Real Python: Python News: What's New From October 2022

As always, October was an eventful month for the Python community this year. It brought the final Python 3.11 release, a few beta versions of the next major releases of popular Python libraries, and some exciting developments in the Python community.

Here’s a quick recap of the most interesting happenings from October 2022.

The Python 3.11 Release

By far, this month’s most exciting event was the release of Python 3.11, overshadowing a few other interesting news items. October was chosen for the annual Python releases a few years ago, giving a stable and predictable release cycle for Python.

The release date of Python 3.11 was originally planned for October 3. Unfortunately, it was delayed due to unexpected problems that were blocking the previous release candidate about a month before. The world had to wait an additional three weeks, until October 24, to finally witness the next major Python release:

This version packs many new features and promises significant performance improvements, an effort that’ll continue in future versions to achieve even better results. The What’s New In Python 3.11 article gives an overview of what has changed since the previous version of the language. The Python 3.11 changelog provides more details with links to the individual GitHub issues and their corresponding code commits.

In short, these are arguably the most worthwhile new features in Python 3.11:

• Even Better Error Messages
• Asynchronous Task and Exception Groups
• TOML and tomllib
• Type Checking Enhancements
• Faster Startup and Code Execution
• Zero-Cost Exceptions

To dive deeper and have a hands-on experience with Python 3.11, head over to our dedicated tutorial or video course about the new features, where you can make your way through the most important language improvements with code examples.

Even though Python 3.11 has just been released, it’s going to be a while before companies and cloud service providers start using it in production on a larger scale. Upgrading the runtime environment is always risky and can lead to downtime, data loss, or other unforeseen problems. That’s precisely why the US army refuses to upgrade their old-school software on mission-critical equipment.

At the same time, it’s worth mentioning that some major Python libraries, especially those in the data science field, began supporting Python 3.11 and tested it thoroughly before the official release. This ensures that users can make a safe switch to Python 3.11 and start taking advantage of the new language features without having to wait for their package dependencies to catch up.

What’s your favorite new feature in Python 3.11?

Updates From the Python Ecosystem

The Python ecosystem keeps moving forward with new releases each month. The pytest 7.2.0 release is now available, and SQLAlchemy 2.0 has finally been released in the beta version. The NetworkX library has also released a beta version of its next major version.

pytest 7.2.0

In late October, the open-source community released a new minor release of pytest, one of the most widespread testing libraries in Python. This version brings a few quality-of-life improvements.