Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule for Python 3.8. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sized items.

Release Manager and Crew

• 3.8 Release Manager: Łukasz Langa
• Windows installers: Steve Dower
• Mac installers: Ned Deily
• Documentation: Julien Palard

3.8 Lifespan

3.8 will receive bugfix updates approximately every 2 months for approximately 18 months. Some time after the release of 3.9.0 final, the ninth and final 3.8 bugfix update will be released. After that, it is expected that security updates (source only) will be released until 5 years after the release of 3.8 final, so until approximately October 2024.

Release Schedule

Features for 3.8

Some of the notable features of Python 3.8 include:

• PEP 570, Positional-only arguments
• PEP 572, Assignment Expressions
• PEP 574, Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data
• PEP 578, Runtime audit hooks
• PEP 587, Python Initialization Configuration
• PEP 590, Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
• Typing-related: PEP 591 (Final qualifier), PEP 586 (Literal types), and PEP 589 (TypedDict)
• Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode
• Debug builds share ABI as release builds
• f-strings support a handy = specifier for debugging
• continue is now legal in finally: blocks
• on Windows, the default asyncio event loop is now ProactorEventLoop
• on macOS, the spawn start method is now used by default in multiprocessing
• multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoid pickling costs between processes
• typed_ast is merged back to CPython
• LOAD_GLOBAL is now 40% faster
• pickle now uses Protocol 4 by default, improving performance

There are many other interesting changes, please consult the “What’s New” page in the documentation for a full list.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.