New Python update slithers into release

Behold, the new, faster version 3.7, with nanosecond timing, data classes and docs in more (human) languages

Version 3.7 of anything probably doesn’t seem that notable, but stick with us here because Python 3.7, released on June 27th, 2018, is the programming language’s first big update in 18 months and adds plenty of new features.

Improving speed was one of the aims for this release and Python’s keepers proudly report that the new version that the new version offers “Notable performance improvements in many areas.”

They’ve also rated the following as among the release’s major new features:

• A new C API for thread-local storage, replacing previous implementations to enable compatibility with TLS ;
• Documentation translations into Japanese, French, and Korean.
• Deterministic pyc files, to improve reproducibility;
• Built-in breakpoint() to make it possible to insert breakpoints with less code;
• Data Classes, as they reduce and simplify the code needed to create classes that store data
• Time functions with nanosecond resolution, because Python can currently lose track of nanoseconds as it tries to convert time as measured by CPUs into seconds
• ”async” and “await” have been made keywords, which is nice because they became part of Python syntax a couple of releases back yet it’s still been possible to use the words as variable names;
• Improved DeprecationWarning handling, because some versions of Python made it possible to hide those warnings, which made it harder to know when APIs were broken.

A complete What’s New explainer can be found here.

What’s next? New Python versions slither out about every 18 months, with mostly-quarterly double-dot updates in-between major releases. When new versions emerge updates cease for the last edition, meaning potential security and other worries. Which is as good a reason as any to go and downloads are yours for the right-clicking here to get your hands on the new Python. ®