Python Insider

Python 3.11.0rc2 is now available

2022-09-12T07:26:00.006-04:00

This is the second release candidate of Python 3.11

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110rc2/

This release, 3.11.0rc2, is the last preview before the final release of Python 3.11.0 on 2022-10-24.

Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this release candidate and the final release. The second candidate and the last planned release preview is currently planned for Monday, 2022-09-05 while the official release is planned for Monday, 2022-10-24.

There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.11 series and the goal is that there will be as few code changes as possible.

Modification of the final release

Due to the fact that we needed to delay the last release candidate by a week and because of personal scheduling problems I am delaying the final release to 2022-10-24 (three weeks from the original date).

Call to action

The 3.11 branch is now accepting changes for 3.11.1. To maximize stability, the final release will be cut from the v3.11.0rc2 tag. If you
need the release manager (me) to cherry-pick any critical fixes, mark issues as release blockers, and/or add me as a reviewer on a critical
backport PR on GitHub. To see which changes are currently cherry-picked for inclusion in 3.11.0, look at the short-lived branch-v3.11.0
https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/branch-v3.11.0 on GitHub.

Core developers: all eyes on the docs now

* Are all your changes properly documented?

* Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Community members

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.11 compatibilities 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.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next release will be the final release of Python 3.11.0, which is currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-10-24.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

In general relativity, a white hole is a theoretical region of spacetime and singularity that cannot be entered from the outside, although energy-matter, light and information can escape from it. In this sense, it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered only from the outside and from which energy-matter, light and information cannot escape. White holes appear in the theory of eternal black holes. In addition to a black hole region in the future, such a solution of the Einstein field equations has a white hole region in its past. This region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, however, nor are there any observed physical processes through which a white hole could be formed. Supermassive black holes are theoretically predicted to be at the centre of every galaxy and that possibly, a galaxy cannot form without one. Stephen Hawking and others have proposed that these supermassive black holes spawn a supermassive white hole.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

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.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python releases 3.10.7, 3.9.14, 3.8.14, and 3.7.14 are now available

2022-09-07T09:03:00.002-04:00

We have some security content, and plenty of regular bug fixes for 3.10. Let’s dive right in.

CVE-2020-10735

Converting between int and str in bases other than 2 (binary), 4, 8 (octal), 16 (hexadecimal), or 32 such as base 10 (decimal) now raises a ValueError if the number of digits in string form is above a limit to avoid potential denial of service attacks due to the algorithmic complexity.

Security releases for 3.9.14, 3.8.14, and 3.7.14 are made available simultaneously to address this issue, along with some less urgent security content.

Upgrading your installations is highly recommended.

Python 3.10.7

Get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3107/

This bugfix version of Python was released out-of-schedule to address the CVE, and as such contains a smaller number of changes compared to 3.10.6 (200 commits), or in fact 3.9.7 (187 commits) at the same stage of the release cycle a year ago. But there’s still over a 100 commits in this latest Python version so it’s worth checking out the change log.

And now for something completely different

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position and momentum or the time and the energy can be predicted from initial conditions.

Such variable pairs are known as complementary variables or canonically conjugate variables; and, depending on interpretation, the uncertainty principle limits to what extent such conjugate properties maintain their approximate meaning, as the mathematical framework of quantum physics does not support the notion of simultaneously well-defined conjugate properties expressed by a single value.

The uncertainty principle implies that it is in general not possible to predict the value of a quantity with arbitrary certainty, even if all initial conditions are specified.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,

Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal
Łukasz Langa @ambv

Python 3.11.0rc1 is now available

2022-08-08T13:17:00.002-04:00

This is the first release candidate of Python 3.11

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110rc1/

This release, **3.11.0rc1**, is the penultimate release preview. Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this release candidate and the final release. The second candidate and the last planned release preview is currently planned for Monday, 2022-09-05 while the official release is planned for Monday, 2022-10-03.

There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.11 series and the goal is that there will be as few code changes as possible.

Call to action

Core developers: all eyes on the docs now

* Are all your changes properly documented?

* Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Community members

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.11 compatibilities 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.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0rc2, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-09-05.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

A quark star is a hypothetical type of compact, exotic star, where extremely high core temperature and pressure have forced nuclear particles to form quark matter, a continuous state of matter consisting of free quarks.

Some massive stars collapse to form neutron stars at the end of their life cycle, as has been both observed and explained theoretically. Under the extreme temperatures and pressures inside neutron stars, the neutrons are normally kept apart by degeneracy pressure, stabilizing the star and hindering further gravitational collapse. However, it is hypothesized that under even more extreme temperature and pressure, the degeneracy pressure of the neutrons is overcome, and the neutrons are forced to merge and dissolve into their constituent quarks, creating an ultra-dense phase of quark matter based on densely packed quarks. In this state, a new equilibrium is supposed to emerge, as a new degeneracy pressure between the quarks, as well as repulsive electromagnetic forces, will occur and hinder total gravitational collapse.

If these ideas are correct, quark stars might occur, and be observable, somewhere in the universe. Theoretically, such a scenario is seen as scientifically plausible, but it has been impossible to prove both observationally and experimentally because the very extreme conditions needed for stabilizing quark matter cannot be created in any laboratory nor observed directly in nature. The stability of quark matter, and hence the existence of quark stars, is for these reasons among the unsolved problems in physics.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.6 is available

2022-08-02T06:14:00.004-04:00

Here you have a nice package of 200 commits of bugfixes and documentation improvements freshly made for Python 3.10. Go and download it when is still hot:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3106/

This is the sixth maintenance release of Python 3.10

Python 3.10.6 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.10 series, compared to 3.9

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 623 – Deprecate and prepare for the removal of the wstr member in PyUnicodeObject.

PEP 604 – Allow writing union types as X | Y

PEP 612 – Parameter Specification Variables

PEP 626 – Precise line numbers for debugging and other tools.

PEP 618 – Add Optional Length-Checking To zip.

bpo-12782: Parenthesized context managers are now officially allowed.

PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module.

PEP 613 – Explicit Type Aliases

PEP 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification

PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale

PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

PEP 644 – Require OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer

PEP 624 – Remove Py_UNICODE encoder APIs

PEP 597 – Add optional EncodingWarning

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 619, 3.10 Release Schedule

Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

bpo-38605: from __future__ import annotations (PEP 563) used to be on this list in previous pre-releases but it has been postponed to Python 3.11 due to some compatibility concerns. You can read the Steering Council communication about it here to learn more.

And now for something completely different

A pentaquark is a human-made subatomic particle, consisting of four quarks and one antiquark bound together; they are not known to occur naturally or exist outside of experiments to create them. As quarks have a baryon number of (+1/3), and antiquarks of (−1/3), the pentaquark would have a total baryon number of 1 and thus would be a baryon. Further, because it has five quarks instead of the usual three found in regular baryons (a.k.a. ‘triquarks’), it is classified as an exotic baryon. The name pentaquark was coined by Claude Gignoux et al. (1987) and Harry J. Lipkin in 1987; however, the possibility of five-quark particles was identified as early as 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann first postulated the existence of quarks. Although predicted for decades, pentaquarks proved surprisingly tricky to discover and some physicists were beginning to suspect that an unknown law of nature prevented their production.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.11.0b5 is now available

2022-07-26T06:29:00.004-04:00

Here we are. The universe. The vastness of spacetime. At the edge. The last frontier. The last beta*(conditions apply) for Python 3.11.

We have defied the powerful gods of release blockers and we have won by using the required amount of ruse and subterfuge.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b5/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.11

Python 3.11 is still in development. 3.11.0b5 is the last of five planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.11 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Monday, 2021-08-02). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 5 and as few code changes as possible after 3.11.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.11 as possible during the beta phase.

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

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0rc1, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-08-01.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

Schwarzschild wormholes, also known as Einstein–Rosen bridges (named after Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen), are connections between areas of space that can be modelled as vacuum solutions to the Einstein field equations, and that are now understood to be intrinsic parts of the maximally extended version of the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole with no charge and no rotation. Here, "maximally extended" refers to the idea that spacetime should not have any "edges": it should be possible to continue this path arbitrarily far into the particle's future or past for any possible trajectory of a free-falling particle (following a geodesic in the spacetime).

The Einstein–Rosen bridge was discovered by Ludwig Flamm in 1916, a few months after Schwarzschild published his solution, and was rediscovered by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who published their result in 1935. However, in 1962, John Archibald Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region.

Although Schwarzschild wormholes are not traversable in both directions, their existence inspired Kip Thorne to imagine traversable wormholes created by holding the "throat" of a Schwarzschild wormhole open with exotic matter (material that has negative mass/energy).

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.11.0b4 is now available

2022-07-11T14:46:00.006-04:00

I cannot believe I am writing this, but Python 3.11.b4 is available!

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b4/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.11

Python 3.11 is still in development. 3.11.0b4 is the fourth of four planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.11 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Monday, 2021-08-02). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.11.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.11 as possible during the beta phase.

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

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0b5, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-07-25.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

The Planck temperature is 1.416784×10**32 K. At this temperature, the wavelength of light emitted by thermal radiation reaches the Planck length. There are no known physical models able to describe temperatures greater than the Planck temperature and a quantum theory of gravity would be required to model the extreme energies attained. Hypothetically, a system in thermal equilibrium at the Planck temperature might contain Planck-scale black holes, constantly being formed from thermal radiation and decaying via Hawking evaporation; adding energy to such a system might decrease its temperature by creating larger black holes, whose Hawking temperature is lower.

Rumours say the Planck temperature can be reached in some of the hottest parts of Spain in summer.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.5 is available

2022-06-06T13:33:00.000-04:00

The latest bugfix drop for Python 3.10 is here: Python 3.10.5. This release packs more than 230 bugfixes and docs changes, so you surely want to update :) You can get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3105/

This is the first maintenance release of Python 3.10

Python 3.10.5 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.10 series, compared to 3.9

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 623 – Deprecate and prepare for the removal of the wstr member in PyUnicodeObject.

PEP 604 – Allow writing union types as X | Y

PEP 612 – Parameter Specification Variables

PEP 626 – Precise line numbers for debugging and other tools.

PEP 618 – Add Optional Length-Checking To zip.

bpo-12782: Parenthesized context managers are now officially allowed.

PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module.

PEP 613 – Explicit Type Aliases

PEP 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification

PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale

PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

PEP 644 – Require OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer

PEP 624 – Remove Py_UNICODE encoder APIs

PEP 597 – Add optional EncodingWarning

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 619, 3.10 Release Schedule

Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

Strange quarks are the third lightest quarks, which are subatomic particles that are so small, they are believed to be the fundamental particles, and not further divisible. Like down quarks, strange quarks have a charge of -1/3. Like all fermions (which are particles that can not exist in the same place at the same time), strange quarks have a spin of 1/2. What makes strange quarks different from down quarks–apart from having 25 times the mass of down quarks–is that they have something that scientists call "strangeness." Strangeness is basically a resistance to decay against strong force and electromagnetism. This means that any particle that contains a strange quark can not decay due to strong force (or electromagnetism), but instead with the much slower weak force. It was believed that this was a 'strange' method of decay, which is why the scientists gave the particles that name.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Expedited release of Python3.11.0b3

2022-06-01T12:51:00.010-04:00

Due to a known incompatibility with pytest and the previous beta release (Python 3.11.0b2) and after some deliberation, I and the rest of the release team have decided to do an expedited release of Python 3.11.0b3 so the community can continue testing their packages with pytest and therefore testing the betas as expected.

Where can I get the new release?

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b3/

What happened?

Pytest by default rewrites the AST nodes in the testing code to provide better diagnostics when something fails in the test. For doing this, it creates new AST nodes that are then compiled. In Python 3.11, after some changes in the compiler and AST nodes, these new AST nodes that pytest was creating were invalid. This causes CPython to crash in debug mode because we have several assert statements in the compiler, but in release mode this doesn't cause always a crash, but it creates potential corrupted structures in the compiler silently. In 3.11.0b3 we changed the compiler to reject invalid AST nodes, so what was a silent problem and a crash in debug mode turned into an exception being raised.

We had a fix to allow the nodes that pytest is creating to work to preserve backwards compatibility but unfortunately, it didn't make it into 3.11.0b2. Is still possible to use pytest with 3.11.0b2 if you add "--assert=plain" to the pytest invocation but given how many users would have to modify their test suite invocation we decided to proceed with a new release that has the fix.

What happens with future beta releases

Python 3.11.0b3 should be considered as an extra beta release. Instead of four beta releases, we will have five and the next beta release (3.11.0b4) will happen as scheduled on Thursday, 2022-06-16.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.11.0b2 is now available

2022-05-31T09:34:00.007-04:00

Does anyone want bug fixes? Because we have 164 new commits fixing different things, from code to documentation. If you have reported some issue after 3.11.0b1, you should check if is fixed and if not, make sure you tell us so we can take a look We still have two more betas to go so help us to make sure we don’t miss anything so everything is ready for the final release

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b2/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.11

Python 3.11 is still in development. 3.11.0b2 is the second of four planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.11 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Monday, 2021-08-02). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.11.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.11 as possible during the beta phase.

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

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0b3, currently scheduled for currently scheduled for Thursday, 2022-06-16

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

The Planck time is the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length in a vacuum, which is a time interval of approximately 5.39*10^(−44) s. No current physical theory can describe timescales shorter than the Planck time, such as the earliest events after the Big Bang, and it is conjectured that the structure of time breaks down on intervals comparable to the Planck time. While there is currently no known way to measure time intervals on the scale of the Planck time, researchers in 2020 found that the accuracy of an atomic clock is constrained by quantum effects on the order of the Planck time, and for the most precise atomic clocks thus far they calculated that such effects have been ruled out to around 10^−33s, or 10 orders of magnitude above the Planck scale.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.9.13 is now available

2022-05-17T13:33:00.000-04:00

This is the thirteenth maintenance release of Python 3.9. Get it here:
Python 3.9.13

According to the release calendar specified in PEP 596, Python 3.9.13 is the final regular maintenance release. Starting now, the 3.9 branch will only accept security fixes and releases of those will be made in source-only form until October 2025.

This is a milestone moment for me as it means that now both of my release series are security-only. My work as release manager enters its final stage. I’m not crying, you’re crying!

Compared to the 3.8 series, this last regular bugfix release is still pretty active at 166 commits since 3.9.12. In comparison, version 3.8.10, the final regular bugfix release of Python 3.8, included only 92 commits. However, it’s likely that it was 3.8 that was special here with the governance changes occupying core developers’ minds. For reference, version 3.7.8, the final regular bugfix release of Python 3.7, included 187 commits.

In any case, 166 commits is quite a few changes, some of which being pretty important fixes. Take a look at the change log for details.

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 573, Module State Access from C Extension Methods
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 614, Relaxing Grammar Restrictions On Decorators
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.

You can find a more comprehensive list in this release’s “What’s New” document.

We hope you enjoy Python 3.9!

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

Python 3.11.0b1 is now available

2022-05-07T23:31:00.003-04:00

We did it, team! After quite a bumpy release process and a bunch of last-time fixes, we have reached beta 1 and feature freeze. What a ride eh? You can get the shiny new release artefacts from here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110b1/

This is a beta preview of Python 3.11

Python 3.11 is still in development. 3.11.0b1 is the first of four planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.11 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Monday, 2021-08-02). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.11.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.11 as possible during the beta phase.

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

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680– tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675– Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655– Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752– Introduce task groups to asyncio
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0b2, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-05-30.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

The holographic principle is a tenet of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region—such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind, who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn.[ Leonard Susskind said, “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience––the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people––is a hologram, an image of reality cited on a distant two-dimensional (2D) surface." As pointed out by Raphael Bousso, Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.

The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory. However, there exist classical solutions to the Einstein equations that allow values of the entropy larger than those allowed by an area law, hence in principle larger than those of a black hole. These are the so-called “Wheeler’s bags of gold”. The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not full

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

The last Python 3.11 alpha (3.11.0a7) is available

2022-04-06T06:33:00.002-04:00

Brrrrr… do you feel that? That’s the chill of beta freeze coming closer. Meanwhile, your friendly CPython release team doesn’t rest and we have prepared a shiny new release for you: Python 3.11.0a7.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110a7/

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
PEP 680– tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
PEP 675– Arbitrary Literal String Type
PEP 655– Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
bpo-46752– Introduce task groups to asyncio
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results: this version of CPython 3.11 is ~19% faster on the geometric mean of the performance benchmarks, compared to 3.10.0.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0b1, currently scheduled for Friday, 2022-05-06.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

In mathematics, the Dirac delta distribution (δ distribution) is a generalized function or distribution over the real numbers, whose value is zero everywhere except at zero, and whose integral over the entire real line is equal to one. The current understanding of the impulse is as a linear functional that maps every continuous function to its value at zero. The delta function was introduced by physicist Paul Dirac as a tool for the normalization of state vectors. It also has uses in probability theory and signal processing. Its validity was disputed until Laurent Schwartz developed the theory of distributions where it is defined as a linear form acting on functions.

Defining this distribution as a “function” as many physicist do is known to be one of the easier ways to annoy mathematicians :)

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.4 and 3.9.12 are now available out of schedule

2022-03-24T08:08:00.000-04:00

Did anybody say cursed releases? Well, it turns out that 3.10.3 and 3.9.11 both shipped a regression which caused those versions not to build on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. While this 11-year-old version is now out of maintenance support, it’s still used in production workloads. Some of those rely on Python 3.9 and/or 3.10. In particular, our own manylinux2010 image used to build widely compatible Linux wheels is based on CentOS 6. (Don’t worry, we do have newer manylinux* variants, see PEP 599 and PEP 600 for details.)

Due to the out-of-schedule release, the respective versions released today contain a very limited set of changes. Python 3.9.12 only contains 12 other bug fixes on top of 3.9.11. Python 3.10.4 only contains 10 other bug fixes on top of 3.10.3.

Get 3.10.4 here: Python Release Python 3.10.4 | Python.org
Get 3.9.12 here: Python Release Python 3.9.12 | Python.org

Hopefully, the third time’s a charm and we’ll return no sooner than May with the regularly scheduled bug fix releases of 3.9 and 3.10.

We hope you enjoy the new releases

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

Python 3.10.3, 3.9.11, 3.8.13, and 3.7.13 are now available with security content

2022-03-16T11:55:00.000-04:00

Welcome again to the exciting world of releasing new Python versions!

Last time around I was complaining about cursed releases. This time around I could complain about security content galore and how one of them ruined my ingenious idea to release Python on Pi Day and call it Py Day. Well, you can’t have everything in life. Or at least not everything at once.

And yet it seems this time around we’ve got a lot of security fixes all at once. Just look at this list:

15 (sic!) CVEs: libexpat upgraded from 2.4.1 to 2.4.7 (BPO-46794, BPO-46932, BPO-46811, BPO-46784, BPO-46400)
CVE-2022-0778: OpenSSL upgraded from 1.1.1l to 1.1.1n in macOS and Windows installers (BPO-47024)
CVE-2016-3189, CVE-2019-12900: bzip2 upgraded from 1.0.6 to 1.0.8 in Windows installers (BPO-44549)
CVE-2022-26488: Windows installer now ensures the correct path is being repaired when “Add to PATH” is used (BPO-46948)
CVE-2021-28363: bundled pip upgraded from 21.2.4 to 22.0.4 (BPO-46985)
authorization bypass fixed in urllib.request (BPO-46756)
REDoS avoided in importlib.metadata (BPO-46474)
SQLite upgraded from 3.36.0 to 3.37.2 in macOS and Windows installers (BPO-45925)

Python 3.10.3

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3103/

Python 3.10.3 is the third maintenance release of the newest version of the Python programming language, which contains many new features and optimizations. We recommend it over the other releases listed below.

This is a large bugfix release with 220 commits since 3.10.2. Just look at the change log!

The next maintenance release of Python 3.10 is planned for early June.

Python 3.9.11

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3911/

This is the penultimate planned full bugfix release of Python 3.9. In mid-May, we’ll be releasing the last one, after which the 3.9 series will enter its security-only fixes period. More details in PEP 596.

Python 3.9 is the first Python version since 2.7 to have a regular bugfix release larger than “.10”. It’s also still a significant release at 163 commits since 3.9.10. That’s in fact 30+ commits more than between 3.9.9 and 3.9.10. The change log isn’t as long as the 3.10.3 one but it’s still pretty extensive!

As a reminder, on macOS, the default installer is now the new universal2 variant. It’s compatible with Mac OS X 10.9 and newer, including macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey. Python installed with this variant will work natively on Apple Silicon processors.

Python 3.8.13

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3813/

Changes here are almost exclusively security-only as the life cycle of Python versions prescribes. You might have noticed there is a small number of regular bug fixes nonetheless. This is because without those we wouldn’t be able to continue running the full test suite for the 3.8 branch. This in turn could hide regressions in future security fixes.

Python 3.7.13

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3713/

Just like 3.8, Python 3.7 is in its security-only fixes period. In turn, the changes in 3.7.13 look almost identical to the ones in 3.8.13.

Python 3.7 will continue to receive source-only releases until June 2023.

We hope you enjoy the new releases

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

Python 3.11.0a6 is available

2022-03-07T13:33:00.004-05:00

There are no easy releases these days! :sweat: After a week of delay due to several release blockers, buildbot problems and pandemic-related difficulties here is 3.11.0a6 for you to test.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110a6/

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results: this version of CPython 3.11 is ~19% faster on the geometric mean of the performance benchmarks, compared to 3.10.0.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0a7, currently scheduled for Tuesday, 2022-04-05.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

In astrophysics and nuclear physics, nuclear pasta is a theoretical type of degenerate matter that is postulated to exist within the crusts of neutron stars. If it does in fact exist, nuclear pasta is the strongest material in the universe. Between the surface of a neutron star and the quark-gluon plasma at the core, at matter densities of 1014 g/cm3, nuclear attraction and Coulomb repulsion forces are of similar magnitude. The competition between the forces leads to the formation of a variety of complex structures assembled from neutrons and protons. Astrophysicists call these types of structures nuclear pasta because the geometry of the structures resembles various types of pasta.

There are several phases of evolution (I swear these names are real), including the gnocchi phase, the spaghetti phase, the lasagna phase, the bucatini phase and the Swiss cheese phase.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.11.0a5 is available

2022-02-03T18:22:00.002-05:00

We needed to tame some angry buildbots, but after a small fight, we won with just some scratches! Here you have a shiny new alpha release: Python 3.11.0a5.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110a5/

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
PEP 673 – Self Type
PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results: this version of CPython 3.11 is ~19% faster on the geometric mean of the performance benchmarks, compared to 3.10.0.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0a6, currently scheduled for Monday, 2022-02-28.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

In physics, the Poynting vector (Umov-Poynting vector) represents the directional energy flux (the energy transfer per unit area per unit time) or power flow of an electromagnetic field. It is named after its discoverer John Henry Poynting who first derived it in 1884. Oliver Heaviside also discovered it independently in the more general form that recognises the freedom of adding the curl of an arbitrary vector field to the definition. The Poynting vector is used throughout electromagnetics in conjunction with Poynting's theorem, the continuity equation expressing conservation of electromagnetic energy, to calculate the power flow in electromagnetic fields.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.2, 3.9.10, and 3.11.0a4 are now available

2022-01-14T18:11:00.001-05:00

Before we begin the usual round of release notes, please do note that the three new versions of Python released today do not contain Windows installers yet. This is temporary, due to a more complex than expected code signing certificate renewal.

We’ve held the releases all week while the situation is getting resolved but the urgency of 3.10.2 in particular made us release without the Windows installers after all. We apologize for the inconvenience and are doing everything we can to put the Windows installer in place as soon as possible.

We’re rooting for both Ee Durbin and Steve Dower who are helping us resolve this. Thanks for your hard work! Hopefully, by this time next week, this will only be a footnote in release management history.

The releases you’re looking at were all cursed in some way. What a way to start 2022! Besides the certificate hold up, Python 3.10.2 is an expedited release (you’ll want to upgrade, read below!), Python 3.11.0a4 had almost 20 (sic, twenty!) release blockers before being finally green, and Python 3.9.10 was made from a new M1 Mac on macOS Monterey which made the usually boring process quite a ride. We’re hoping 2022 won’t be this intense all year!

Python 3.10.2

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3102/

This is a special bugfix release ahead of schedule to address a memory leak that was happening on certain function calls when using Cython. The memory leak consisted of a small constant amount of bytes in certain function calls from Cython code. Although in most cases this was not very noticeable, it was very impactful for long-running applications and certain usage patterns. Check bpo-46347 for more information.

Upgrading existing Python 3.10 installations is highly recommended. Even though this is an expedited release, it still contains over 100 other bug fixes. See the change log for details.

The next Python 3.10 maintenance release will be 3.10.3, currently scheduled for 2022-04-04.

Python 3.9.10

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3910/

Python 3.9.10 is the ninth maintenance release of the legacy 3.9 series. Note: Python 3.10 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3.

Python 3.9 micro-releases enter double digits! There’s been 130 commits since 3.9.9 which is a higher number of fixes for this stage of the life cycle compared to 3.8. See the changelog for details on what changed.

The next Python 3.9 maintenance release will be 3.9.11, currently scheduled for Pi Day '22 (2022-03-14).

Python 3.11.0a4

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110a4/

Python 3.11 is still in development. This release, 3.11.0a4, is the fourth of seven planned alpha releases.

Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes by the community, as well as to test the release process.

During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase (2022-05-06) and, if necessary, may be modified or deleted up until the release candidate phase (2022-08-01). Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Many new features for Python 3.11 are still being planned and written. Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
The Faster CPython Project is already yielding some exciting results: this version of CPython 3.11 is ~ 19% faster on the geometric mean of the PyPerformance benchmarks, compared to 3.10.0.
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0a5, currently scheduled for Wednesday, 2022-02-02.

Python 3.6 is pining for the fjords

Python 3.6 is no more. It’s an ex-Python. It has ceased to be. On December 23rd 2021 is has reached its end-of-life phase after five successful years.

It’s been the first truly popular Python 3 release, introducing f-strings to the world and making big improvements to both asyncio (async generators!) and typing (variable annotations!).

We’d like to congratulate Ned Deily @nad on successfully driving the 3.6 series to completion as Release Manager. He’s not fully retired yet, as 3.7, which he is also managing, is still receiving security patches until June 2023.

We hope you enjoy the new releases

Your friendly release team,
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal
Łukasz Langa @ambv

Python 3.11.0a3 is available

2021-12-08T18:54:00.003-05:00

You can tell that we are slowly getting closer to the first beta as the number of release blockers that we need to fix on every release starts to increase But we did it!

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110a1/

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results: this version of CPython 3.11 is ~19% faster on the geometric mean of the performance benchmarks, compared to 3.10.0.

(Hey,

fellow core developer,

if a feature you find important is missing from this list,

let Pablo know

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0a3, currently scheduled for 2022-01-03.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

Rayleigh scattering, named after the nineteenth-century British physicist Lord Rayleigh is the predominantly elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. For light frequencies well below the resonance frequency of the scattering particle, the amount of scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. Rayleigh scattering results from the electric polarizability of the particles. The oscillating electric field of a light wave acts on the charges within a particle, causing them to move at the same frequency. The particle, therefore, becomes a small radiating dipole whose radiation we see as scattered light. The particles may be individual atoms or molecules; it can occur when light travels through transparent solids and liquids but is most prominently seen in gases.

The strong wavelength dependence of the scattering means that shorter (blue) wavelengths are scattered more strongly than longer (red) wavelengths. This results in the indirect blue light coming from all regions of the sky.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.1 is available

2021-12-06T19:07:00.003-05:00

I hope you like bug fixes, because we have a whole shipment of them! Python 3.10.1 is the first maintenance release of Python 3.10 as we have packed more than 330 commits of fixes and general improvements. You can get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3101/

This is the first maintenance release of Python 3.10

Python 3.10.1 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.10 series, compared to 3.9

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 623 – Deprecate and prepare for the removal of the wstr member in PyUnicodeObject.

PEP 604 – Allow writing union types as X | Y

PEP 612 – Parameter Specification Variables

PEP 626 – Precise line numbers for debugging and other tools.

PEP 618 – Add Optional Length-Checking To zip.

bpo-12782: Parenthesized context managers are now officially allowed.

PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module.

PEP 613 – Explicit Type Aliases

PEP 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification

PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale

PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

PEP 644 – Require OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer

PEP 624 – Remove Py_UNICODE encoder APIs

PEP 597 – Add optional EncodingWarning

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 619, 3.10 Release Schedule

Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

The Meissner effect (or Meissner–Ochsenfeld effect) is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state when it is cooled below the critical temperature. This expulsion will repel a nearby magnet. The German physicists Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered this phenomenon in 1933 by measuring the magnetic field distribution outside superconducting tin and lead samples. The experiment demonstrated for the first time that superconductors were more than just perfect conductors and provided a uniquely defining property of the superconductor state. The ability for the expulsion effect is determined by the nature of equilibrium formed by the neutralization within the unit cell of a superconductor.

You can do very cool things with it!

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.9.9 hotfix release is now available

2021-11-15T17:09:00.004-05:00

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-399/

Python 3.9.9 is the eighth maintenance release of the legacy 3.9 series. Python 3.10 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. Get the latest release of 3.10.x here.

3.9.9 was released out of schedule as a hotfix for an argparse regression in Python 3.9.8 which caused complex command-line tools to fail recognizing sub-commands properly. Details in BPO-45235. There are only three other bugfixes in this release compared to 3.9.8. See the changelog for details on what changed.

Upgrading to 3.9.9 is highly recommended if you’re running Python 3.9.8.

The next Python 3.9 maintenance release will be 3.9.10, currently scheduled for 2022-01-03.

We apologize for the inconvenience

…and still hope you’ll enjoy the new release!

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

Python 3.9.8 and 3.11.0a2 are now available

2021-11-05T19:09:00.000-04:00

Tcl/Tk updates

With the recent release of macOS 12 Monterey, we noticed that tkinter file dialogs are failing to show up on this new operating system, including in our built-in IDLE. Thanks to rapid help from the Tk team, and Marc Culler in particular, we were able to fix the issue by bundling Python 3.9.8 and Python 3.11.0a2 with a fixed Tcl/Tk version. In 3.9.8 it’s a patched 8.6.11 release while 3.11.0a2 is rocking the bleeding-edge 8.6.12rc1.

Since the issue also affected our latest stable version, 3.10.0, an updated macOS installer for this version was issued. You can recognize it by the post2 version appendix: python-3.10.0post2-macos11.pkg. We didn’t have to bump the version number of Python itself since there are no Python source differences between this package and the original 3.10.0. The only difference is the bundled patched Tcl/Tk library.

Initially the original 3.10.0 installer was removed from the website after all URLs got updated to point to the patched version but it turned out this breaks some workflows so the patched installer is now also available under the original filename.

Python 3.9.8

Get it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-398/

Python 3.9.8 is the seventh maintenance release of the legacy 3.9 series. Python 3.10 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. Get the latest release of 3.10.x here.

There’s been 202 commits since 3.9.7 which shows that there’s still considerable interest in improving Python 3.9. To compare, at the same stage of the release cycle Python 3.8 received over 25% fewer commits. See the changelog for details on what changed.

On macOS, the default installer is now the new universal2 variant. It’s compatible with Mac OS X 10.9 and newer, including macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey. You may need to upgrade third-party components, like pip, to the newest versions. You may experience differences in behavior in IDLE and other Tk-based applications due to using the newest version of Tk. As always, if you encounter problems when using this installer variant, please check https://bugs.python.org for existing reports and for opening new issues.

The next Python 3.9 maintenance release will be 3.9.9, currently scheduled for 2022-01-03.

Python 3.11.0a2

Python 3.11 is still in development. This release, 3.11.0a2 is the second of seven planned alpha releases.

Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process.

Many new features for Python 3.11 are still being planned and written. Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
The Faster CPython Project 1 is already yielding some exciting results: this version of CPython 3.11 is ~12% faster on the geometric mean of the PyPerformance benchmarks, compared to 3.10.0.
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0a3, currently scheduled for Monday, 2021-12-06.

We hope you enjoy the new releases

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

Python 3.11.0a1 is available

2021-10-07T08:03:00.006-04:00

Now that we are on a release spree, here you have the first alpha release of Python 3.11: Python 3.11.0a1. Let the testing and validation games begin!

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110a1/

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
PEP 654 – PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0a2, currently scheduled for 2021-11-02.

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

Schwarzschild black holes are also unique because they have a space-like singularity at their core, which means that the singularity doesn't happen at a specific point in *space* but happens at a specific point in *time* (the future). This means once you are inside the event horizon you cannot point with your finger towards the direction the singularity is located because the singularity happens in your future: no matter where you move, you will "fall" into it.

For a Schwarzschild black hole (a black hole with no rotation or electromagnetic charge), given a free fall particle starting at the event horizon, the maximum propper time (which happens when it falls without angular velocity) it will experience to fall into the singularity is `π*M` (in natural units), where M is the mass of the black hole. For Sagittarius A* (the black hole at the centre of the milky way) this time is approximately 1 minute.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.0 is available

2021-10-04T17:07:00.006-04:00

On behalf of the Python development community and the Python 3.10 release team, I’m pleased to announce the availability of Python 3.10.0.

Python 3.10.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3100/

Major new features of the 3.10 series, compared to 3.9

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 623 – Deprecate and prepare for the removal of the wstr member in PyUnicodeObject.

PEP 604 – Allow writing union types as X | Y

PEP 612 – Parameter Specification Variables

PEP 626 – Precise line numbers for debugging and other tools.

PEP 618 – Add Optional Length-Checking To zip.

bpo-12782: Parenthesized context managers are now officially allowed.

PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module.

PEP 613 – Explicit Type Aliases

PEP 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification

PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale

PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

PEP 644 – Require OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer

PEP 624 – Remove Py_UNICODE encoder APIs

PEP 597 – Add optional EncodingWarning

More resources

Online Documentation

PEP 619, 3.10 Release Schedule

Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad
Steve Dower @steve.dower
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Python 3.10.0rc2 is available

2021-09-07T19:33:00.004-04:00

Python 3.10 is one month away, can you believe it? This snake is still trying to bite as it has been an interesting day of fighting fires, release blockers, and a bunch of late bugs but your friendly release team always delivers

You can get this new release while is still fresh here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3100rc2/

This release, 3.10.0rc2, is the last preview before the final release of Python 3.10.0 on 2021-10-04. Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between release candidates and the final release. There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.10 series and the goal is that there will be as few code changes as possible.

Call to action

The 3.10 branch is now accepting changes for 3.10.1. To maximize stability, the final release will be cut from the v3.10.0rc2 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 3.10.0, look at the short-lived branch-v3.10.0 https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/branch-v3.10.0 on GitHub.

Core developers: all eyes on the docs now

Are all your changes properly documented?

Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Community members

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.10 compatibilities 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.

Major new features of the 3.10 series, compared to 3.9

Many new features for Python 3.10 are still being planned and written. Among the new major new features and changes so far:

PEP 623 – Deprecate and prepare for the removal of the wstr member in PyUnicodeObject.
PEP 604 – Allow writing union types as X | Y
PEP 612 – Parameter Specification Variables
PEP 626 – Precise line numbers for debugging and other tools.
PEP 618 – Add Optional Length-Checking To zip.
bpo-12782: Parenthesized context managers are now officially allowed.
PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module.
PEP 613 – Explicit Type Aliases
PEP 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification
PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale
PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial
PEP 644 – Require OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer
PEP 624 – Remove Py_UNICODE encoder APIs
PEP 597 – Add optional EncodingWarning
(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next release will be the final release of Python 3.10.0, which is currently scheduled for Monday, 2021-10-04.

More resources

And now for something completely different

Maxwell’s demon is a thought experiment that would hypothetically violate the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small massless door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. Because the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon’s actions cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the two gases, without applying any work, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics.

We hope you enjoy those new releases!

Your friendly release team,

Pablo Galindo @pablogsal

Ned Deily @nad

Steve Dower @steve.dower

Python 3.7.12 and 3.6.15 security updates now available

2021-09-04T18:00:00.001-04:00

Python 3.7.12 and 3.6.15, the lastest security fix rollups for Python 3.7 and Python 3.6, are now available. You can find the release files, links to the changelogs, and more information here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3712/
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3615/

These releases are source code only; Windows and macOS binary installers are not provided for security fix releases.

Note that Python 3.9 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. You should consider upgrading to 3.9 as soon as practical. Get the latest release of 3.9.x here.