filling a dictionary of counts from an iterable

Question

What is the most pythonic way to fill a dictionary of counts from an iterable?

I know that there is collections.Counter, with which I can do

counter = Counter(iterable)

and then use counter just like a dictionary having as keys the distinct items of iterable and as values their counts.

But there must be a pythonic way of doing the same thing with a regular dict, something more compact than

count = {}
for item in iterable:
    if item not in count:
        count[item] = 1
    else:
        count[item] += 1

What is it?

Answer 1

One simple way:

count = {}
for item in iterable:
    count[item] = count.get(item, 0) + 1

But generally, you should just use a collections.Counter. You don't use a Counter "just like" a dict, it is a dict.