On behalf of the Python development team, I'm delighted to announce the second and final release candidate of Python 3.4.

This is a preview release, and its use is not recommended for production settings.

Python 3.4 includes a range of improvements of the 3.x series, including hundreds of small improvements and bug fixes. Major new features and changes in the 3.4 release series include:

• PEP 428, a "pathlib" module providing object-oriented filesystem paths
• PEP 435, a standardized "enum" module
• PEP 436, a build enhancement that will help generate introspection information for builtins
• PEP 442, improved semantics for object finalization
• PEP 443, adding single-dispatch generic functions to the standard library
• PEP 445, a new C API for implementing custom memory allocators
• PEP 446, changing file descriptors to not be inherited by default in subprocesses
• PEP 450, a new "statistics" module
• PEP 451, standardizing module metadata for Python's module import system
• PEP 453, a bundled installer for the *pip* package manager
• PEP 454, a new "tracemalloc" module for tracing Python memory allocations
• PEP 456, a new hash algorithm for Python strings and binary data
• PEP 3154, a new and improved protocol for pickled objects
• PEP 3156, a new "asyncio" module, a new framework for asynchronous I/O

Python 3.4 is now in "feature freeze", meaning that no new features will be added. The final release is projected for mid-March 2014.

The python.org web site has recently been updated to something completely new, and I'm having some difficulty updating it. For now I've made Python 3.4.0rc2 available on the legacy web site:

 http://legacy.python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/

Once I can update the new web site, Python 3.4.0rc2 will be available here:

http://python.org/download/releases/

(I'm not sure what the final URL will be, but you'll see it listed on that page.)

Please consider trying Python 3.4.0rc2 with your code and reporting any new issues you notice to:

  http://bugs.python.org/

Enjoy!

-- Larry Hastings, Release Manager larry at hastings.org (on behalf of the entire python-dev team and 3.4's contributors)