Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule for Python 3.8. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sized items.

Release Manager and Crew

• 3.8 Release Manager: Łukasz Langa
• Windows installers: Steve Dower
• Mac installers: Ned Deily
• Documentation: Julien Palard

3.8 Lifespan

3.8 will receive bugfix updates approximately every 1-3 months for approximately 18 months. After the release of 3.9.0 final, a final 3.8 bugfix update will be released. After that, it is expected that security updates (source only) will be released until 5 years after the release of 3.8 final, so until approximately October 2024.

Release Schedule

Features for 3.8

Some of the notable features of Python 3.8 include:

• PEP 570, Positional-only arguments
• PEP 572, Assignment Expressions
• PEP 574, Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data
• PEP 578, Runtime audit hooks
• PEP 587, Python Initialization Configuration
• PEP 590, Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
• Typing-related: PEP 591 (Final qualifier), PEP 586 (Literal types), and PEP 589 (TypedDict)
• Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode
• Debug builds share ABI as release builds
• f-strings support a handy = specifier for debugging
• continue is now legal in finally: blocks
• on Windows, the default asyncio event loop is now ProactorEventLoop
• on macOS, the spawn start method is now used by default in multiprocessing
• multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoid pickling costs between processes
• typed_ast is merged back to CPython
• LOAD_GLOBAL is now 40% faster
• pickle now uses Protocol 4 by default, improving performance

There are many other interesting changes, please consult the "What's New" page in the documentation for a full list.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.