On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 13:46, Georg Brandl georg@python.org wrote:
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On behalf of the Python development team, I'm happy to announce the first of two beta preview releases of Python 3.2.
Python 3.2 is a continuation of the efforts to improve and stabilize the Python 3.x line. Since the final release of Python 2.7, the 2.x line will only receive bugfixes, and new features are developed for 3.x only.
Since PEP 3003, the Moratorium on Language Changes, is in effect, there are no changes in Python's syntax and built-in types in Python 3.2. Development efforts concentrated on the standard library and support for porting code to Python 3. Highlights are:
- numerous improvements to the unittest module
- PEP 3147, support for .pyc repository directories
- PEP 3149, support for version tagged dynamic libraries
- PEP 3148, a new futures library for concurrent programming
- PEP 384, a stable ABI for extension modules
- PEP 391, dictionary-based logging configuration
- an overhauled GIL implementation that reduces contention
- an extended email package that handles bytes messages
- countless fixes regarding bytes/string issues; among them full support for a bytes environment (filenames, environment variables)
- many consistency and behavior fixes for numeric operations
- a sysconfig module to access configuration information
- a pure-Python implementation of the datetime module
- additions to the shutil module, among them archive file support
- improvements to pdb, the Python debugger
For a more extensive list of changes in 3.2, see
- Introduction of a new importlib ABC to make supporting PEP 3147 (and any future bytecode changes) transparent along with deprecating the old source and bytecode-based ABCs in a backwards-compatible way.
This may be more of a What's New entry to go with the PEP 3147 mention, though, than a highlight.