Your two examples do the same thing, but that doesn’t mean get and setdefault do.
The difference between the two is basically manually setting d[key] to point to the list every time, versus setdefault automatically setting d[key] to the list only when it’s unset.
Making the two methods as similar as possible, I ran
from timeit import timeit
print timeit("c = d.get(0, []); c.extend([1]); d[0] = c", "d = {1: []}", number = 1000000)
print timeit("c = d.get(1, []); c.extend([1]); d[0] = c", "d = {1: []}", number = 1000000)
print timeit("d.setdefault(0, []).extend([1])", "d = {1: []}", number = 1000000)
print timeit("d.setdefault(1, []).extend([1])", "d = {1: []}", number = 1000000)
and got
0.794723378711
0.811882272256
0.724429205999
0.722129751973
So setdefault is around 10% faster than get for this purpose.
The get method allows you to do less than you can with setdefault. You can use it to avoid getting a KeyError when the key doesn’t exist (if that’s something that’s going to happen frequently) even if you don’t want to set the key.
See Use cases for the ‘setdefault’ dict method and dict.get() method returns a pointer for some more info about the two methods.
The thread about setdefault concludes that most of the time, you want to use a defaultdict. The thread about get concludes that it is slow, and often you’re better off (speed wise) doing a double lookup, using a defaultdict, or handling the error (depending on the size of the dictionary and your use case).