On behalf of the Python development team, I'm happy to announce the fourth alpha release of Python 3.3.0. This is a preview release, and its use is not recommended in production settings. Python 3.3 includes a range of improvements of the 3.x series, as well as easier porting between 2.x and 3.x. Major new features and changes in the 3.3 release series are: * PEP 380, syntax for delegating to a subgenerator ("yield from") * PEP 393, flexible string representation (doing away with the distinction between "wide" and "narrow" Unicode builds) * A C implementation of the "decimal" module, with up to 80x speedup for decimal-heavy applications * The import system (__import__) is based on importlib by default * The new "packaging" module (also known as distutils2, and released standalone under this name), implementing the new packaging formats and deprecating "distutils" * The new "lzma" module with LZMA/XZ support * PEP 405, virtual environment support in core * PEP 420, namespace package support * PEP 3151, reworking the OS and IO exception hierarchy * PEP 3155, qualified name for classes and functions * PEP 409, suppressing exception context * PEP 414, explicit Unicode literals to help with porting * PEP 418, extended platform-independent clocks in the "time" module * PEP 412, a new key-sharing dictionary implementation that significantly saves memory for object-oriented code * The new "faulthandler" module that helps diagnosing crashes * The new "unittest.mock" module * The new "ipaddress" module * A "collections.ChainMap" class for linking mappings to a single unit * Wrappers for many more POSIX functions in the "os" and "signal" modules, as well as other useful functions such as "sendfile()" * Hash randomization, introduced in earlier bugfix releases, is now switched on by default For a more extensive list of changes in 3.3.0, see http://docs.python.org/3.3/whatsnew/3.3.html (*) To download Python 3.3.0 visit: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.3.0/ Please consider trying Python 3.3.0 with your code and reporting any bugs you may notice to: http://bugs.python.org/ Enjoy! (*) Please note that this document is usually finalized late in the release cycle and therefore may have stubs and missing entries at this point. -- Georg Brandl, Release Manager georg at python.org (on behalf of the entire python-dev team and 3.3's contributors)