Python 3.11.0b2 is now available

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!

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 3.9.13 is now available

 

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!

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

Python 3.11.0b1 is now available

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!

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