Monday, August 8, 2022

Python 3.11.0rc1 is now available


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

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!

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.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Python 3.10.6 is available

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 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification
  • PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale
  • PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

More resources

bpo-38605from __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!

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.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Python 3.11.0b5 is now available

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

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!

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.

Monday, July 11, 2022

Python 3.11.0b4 is now available

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

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!

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.

Monday, June 6, 2022

Python 3.10.5 is available

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 634 – Structural Pattern Matching: Specification
  • PEP 635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale
  • PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

More resources

bpo-38605from __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

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!

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.

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Expedited release of Python3.11.0b3

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?



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!

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.

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

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  :eyes: 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 :rocket:

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

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.