On behalf of the Python development community and the Python 3.7 release team, I'm happy to announce the availability of Python 3.7.0b2. b2 is the second of four planned beta releases of Python 3.7, the next major release of Python, and marks the end of the feature development phase for 3.7. You can find Python 3.7.0b2 here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-370b2/

Among the new major new features in Python 3.7 are:

* PEP 538, Coercing the legacy C locale to a UTF-8 based locale * PEP 539, A New C-API for Thread-Local Storage in CPython * PEP 540, UTF-8 mode * PEP 552, Deterministic pyc * PEP 553, Built-in breakpoint() * PEP 557, Data Classes * PEP 560, Core support for typing module and generic types * PEP 562, Module __getattr__ and __dir__ * PEP 563, Postponed Evaluation of Annotations * PEP 564, Time functions with nanosecond resolution * PEP 565, Show DeprecationWarning in __main__ * PEP 567, Context Variables

Please see "What’s New In Python 3.7" for more information. Additional documentation for these features and for other changes will be provided during the beta phase.

https://docs.python.org/3.7/whatsnew/3.7.html

Beta releases are intended to give you the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release. We strongly encourage you to test your projects with 3.7 during the beta phase and report issues found to https://bugs.python.org as soon as possible.

While the release is 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 (2018-05-21). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 3 and no code changes after rc1. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.7 as possible during the beta phase.

Attention macOS users: as of b1, there is a new installer variant for macOS 10.9+ that includes a built-in version of Tcl/Tk 8.6. This variant is expected to become the default version when 3.7.0 releases. Check it out! We welcome your feedback.

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

The next planned release of Python 3.7 will be 3.7.0b3, currently scheduled for 2018-03-26. More information about the release schedule can be found here:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0537/

-- Ned Deily nad@python.org -- []