Release Date: June 5, 2024

This is a beta preview of Python 3.13

Python 3.13 is still in development. This release, 3.13.0b2, is the second of four beta release previews of 3.13.

Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.13 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Tuesday 2024-07-30). Our goal is to have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.13.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.13 as possible during the beta phase.

Two particularly noteworthy changes in beta 2 involve the macOS installer we provide:

• The minimum supported macOS version was changed from 10.9 to 10.13 (High Sierra). Older macOS versions will not be supported going forward.
• The macOS installer package now includes an optional additional build of Python 3.13 with the experimental free-threading feature enabled. The free-threaded version, python3.13t, is separate from and co-exists with the traditional GIL-only installation. The free-threaded build is not installed by default; use the Customize option of the installer as explained in the installer readme. Since this is an experimental feature, there may be late-breaking issues found; see the free-threaded macOS build issue on GitHub for the most recent status.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.13 series, compared to 3.12

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.13 are:

New features

• A new and improved interactive interpreter, based on PyPy's, featuring multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
• An experimental free-threaded build mode, which disables the Global Interpreter Lock, allowing threads to run more concurrently.
• A preliminary, experimental JIT, providing the ground work for significant performance improvements.
• The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental, which should mean shorter pauses for collection in programs with a lot of objects.
• A modified version of mimalloc is now included, optional but enabled by default if supported by the platform, and required for the free-threaded build mode.
• Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files. (Most tools handling docstrings already strip leading indentation.)
• The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.

Typing

• Support for type defaults in type parameters.
• A new type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
• A new annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.

Removals and new deprecations

• PEP 594 (Removing dead batteries from the standard library) scheduled removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.
• Many other removals of deprecated classes, functions and methods in various standard library modules.
• C API removals and deprecations. (Some removals present in alpha 1 were reverted in alpha 2, as the removals were deemed too disruptive at this time.)
• New deprecations, most of which are scheduled for removal from Python 3.15 or 3.16.

(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Thomas know.)

For more details on the changes to Python 3.13, see What's new in Python 3.13. The next pre-release of Python 3.13 will be 3.13.0b3, currently scheduled for 2024-06-25.

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 719, 3.13 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues.
• Help fund Python directly (or via GitHub Sponsors), and support the Python community.

Full Changelog