Real Python: Python News: What's New From September 2022?

In September 2022, the Python 3.11.0rc2 release candidate version became available for you to test and stay on top of Python’s latest features. This release is the last preview version before the final release of Python 3.11.0, which is scheduled for October 24, 2022.

Python’s latest bugfix versions, including 3.10.7, have introduced breaking changes to cope with a security vulnerability that affects the str to int conversion and can leave you open to DDoS attacks.

As usual, the Python ecosystem has celebrated the release of new versions of many fundamental packages, libraries, and frameworks.

Let’s dive into the most exciting Python news from the past month!

Python 3.11.0rc2 Was Released

Every month, Python releases several versions from its different development branches. New releases typically add new features, fix bugs, correct security vulnerabilities, and more. September 2022 brought several new releases for Python programmers to test, use, and enjoy. Most notable was Python’s last 3.11 release candidate.

Python 3.11.0rc2 was released on Monday, September 12, 2022. This is the last preview version before the final release of Python 3.11.0:

Only reviewed changes that fix bugs are allowed during the release candidate phase. There will be very few, if any, code changes between this release candidate and the final release. As listed in the release post, the new features of the 3.11 series, as compared to 3.10, include the following:

• PEP 657– Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654– Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 680– tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• PEP 673– Self Type
• PEP 646– Variadic Generics
• PEP 675– Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655– Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• PEP 681– Data Class Transforms

Python 3.11 also comes with a couple of other exciting updates. gh-90908 introduces task groups to asyncio, and gh-34627 allows for atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) in regular expressions.

Plus, Python 3.11 is going to deliver faster performance:

The Faster CPython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details. (Source)

To dive deeper into some of these cool new features of Python 3.11, check out the following resources depending on your specific needs and interests: