Python Insider: September 2020

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Python 3.8.6 is now available

Python 3.8.6 is the sixth maintenance release of Python 3.8. Go get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-386/

Maintenance releases for the 3.8 series will continue at regular bi-monthly intervals, with 3.8.7 planned for mid-November 2020.

What’s new?

The Python 3.8 series is the newest feature release of the Python language, and it contains many new features and optimizations. See the “What’s New in Python 3.8” document for more information about features included in the 3.8 series.

Python 3.8 is becoming more stable. Our bugfix releases are becoming smaller as we progress. This one contains 122 changes, less than two thirds of the previous average for a new release. Detailed information about all changes made in version 3.8.6 specifically can be found in its change log. Note that compared to 3.8.5 this release also contains all changes present in 3.8.6rc1.

We hope you enjoy Python 3.8!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Łukasz Langa @ambv

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Python 3.9.0rc2 is now available for testing

Python 3.9.0 is almost ready. This release, 3.9.0rc2, is the last planned preview before the final release of Python 3.9.0 on 2020-10-05. Get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-390rc2/

In the mean time, we strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.9 compatibility during this phase. As always, report any issues to the Python bug tracker.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Information for core developers

The 3.9 branch is now accepting changes for 3.9.1. To maximize stability, the final release will be cut from the v3.9.0rc2 tag. If you need the release manager to cherry-pick any critical fixes, mark issues as release blockers and/or add him as a reviewer on a critical backport PR on GitHub.

To see which changes are currently cherry-picked for inclusion in 3.9.0, look at the short-lived branch-v3.9.0 on GitHub.

Installer news

This is the first version of Python to default to the 64-bit installer on Windows. The installer now also actively disallows installation on Windows 7. Python 3.9 is incompatible with this unsupported version of Windows.

Major new features of the 3.9 series, compared to 3.8

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.9 are:

PEP 584, Union Operators in dict
PEP 585, Type Hinting Generics In Standard Collections
PEP 593, Flexible function and variable annotations
PEP 602, Python adopts a stable annual release cadence
PEP 615, Support for the IANA Time Zone Database in the Standard Library
PEP 616, String methods to remove prefixes and suffixes
PEP 617, New PEG parser for CPython
BPO 38379, garbage collection does not block on resurrected objects;
BPO 38692, os.pidfd_open added that allows process management without races and signals;
BPO 39926, Unicode support updated to version 13.0.0;
BPO 1635741, when Python is initialized multiple times in the same process, it does not leak memory anymore;
A number of Python builtins (range, tuple, set, frozenset, list, dict) are now sped up using PEP 590 vectorcall;
A number of Python modules (_abc, audioop, _bz2, _codecs, _contextvars, _crypt, _functools, _json, _locale, operator, resource, time, _weakref) now use multiphase initialization as defined by PEP 489;
A number of standard library modules (audioop, ast, grp, _hashlib, pwd, _posixsubprocess, random, select, struct, termios, zlib) are now using the stable ABI defined by PEP 384.

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