I’m pleased to announce the release of Python 3.13 beta 4.

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130b4/

 

This is a beta preview of Python 3.13

Python 3.13 is still in development. This release, 3.13.0b4, is the final beta release preview of 3.13.

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 3.13 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 (Tuesday 2024-07-30). Our goal is to have no ABI changes
after this final beta release, and as few code changes as possible
after 3.13.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will
be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.13 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 3.13 series, compared to 3.12

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.13 are:

New features

• A new and improved interactive interpreter, based on PyPy’s, featuring multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
• An experimental free-threaded build mode,
  which disables the Global Interpreter Lock, allowing threads to run
  more concurrently. The build mode is available as an experimental
  feature in the Windows and macOS installers as well.
• A preliminary, experimental JIT, providing the ground work for significant performance improvements.
• The locals() builtin function (and its C equivalent) now has well-defined semantics when mutating the returned mapping, which allows debuggers to operate more consistently.
• The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental, which should mean shorter pauses for collection in programs with a lot of objects.
• A modified version of mimalloc is now included, optional but enabled by default if supported by the platform, and required for the free-threaded build mode.
• Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files. (Most tools handling docstrings already strip leading indentation.)
• The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
• The minimum supported macOS version was changed from 10.9 to 10.13 (High Sierra). Older macOS versions will not be supported going forward.
• WASI is now a Tier 2 supported platform. Emscripten is no longer an officially supported platform (but Pyodide continues to support Emscripten).

Typing

• Support for type defaults in type parameters.
• A new type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
• A new annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
• A new annotation for marking deprecations in the type system.

Removals and new deprecations

• PEP 594 (Removing dead batteries from the standard library) scheduled removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.
• Many other removals of deprecated classes, functions and methods in various standard library modules.
• C API removals and deprecations. (Some removals present in alpha 1 were reverted in alpha 2, as the removals were deemed too disruptive at this time.)
• New deprecations, most of which are scheduled for removal from Python 3.15 or 3.16.

(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Thomas know.)

For more details on the changes to Python 3.13, see What’s new in Python 3.13. The next pre-release of Python 3.13 will be 3.13.0rc1, the first release candidate, currently scheduled for 2024-07-30.

 

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 719, 3.13 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues.
• Help fund Python directly (or via GitHub Sponsors), and support the Python community.

 

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.

 

Your release team,
Thomas Wouters
Łukasz Langa
Ned Deily
Steve Dower 

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On the occasion of the Point Zero Forum’s Innovation Tour, Evgeny Grin has interviewed Mikolai Gütschow who designed and implemented solutions for the payments in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Well, this sure is something to wake up to: a massive worldwide outage of computer systems due to a problem with CrowdStrike software. Payment systems, airlines, hospitals, governments, TV stations – pretty much anything or anyone using computers could be dealing with bluescreens, bootloops, and similar issues today. Open-heart surgeries had to be stopped mid-surgery, planes can’t take off, people can’t board trains, shoppers can pay for their groceries, and much, much more, all over the world. The problem is caused by CrowdStrike, a sort-of enterprise AV/monitoring software that uses a Windows NT kernel driver to monitor everything people do on corporate machines and logs it for… Security purposes, I guess? I’ve never worked in a corporate setting so I have no experience with software like this. From what I hear, software like this is deeply loathed by workers the world over, as it gets in the way and slows systems down. And, as can happen with a kernel driver, a bug can cause massive worldwide outages which is costing people billions in damages and may even have killed people. There is a workaround, posted by CrowdStrike: This is a solution for individually fixing affected machines, but I’ve seen responses like “great, how do I apply this to 70k endpoints?”, indicating that this may not be a practical solution for many affected customers. Then there’s the issue that this may require a BitLocker password, which not everyone has on hand either. To add insult to injury, CrowdStrike’s advisory about the issue is locked behind a login wall. A shitshow all around. Do note that while the focus is on Windows, Linux machines can run CrowdStrike software too, and I’ve heard from Linux kernel engineers who happen to also administer large numbers of Linux servers that they’re seeing a huge spike in Linux kernel panics… Caused by CrowdStrike, which is installed on a lot more Linux servers than you might think. So while Windows is currently the focus of the story, the problems are far more widespread than just Windows. I’m sure we’re going to see some major consequences here, and my – misplaced, I’m sure – is that this will make people think twice about one, using these invasive anti-worker monitoring tools, and two, employing kernel drivers for this nonsense.