Release Date: July 29, 2019

This is a beta preview of Python 3.8

Python 3.8 is still in development. This release, 3.8.0b3 is the third of four planned beta release previews. 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.

Call to action

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.8 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 (2019-09-30). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 3 and no code changes after 3.8.0rc1, the release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.8 as possible during the beta phase.

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

Major new features of the 3.8 series, compared to 3.7

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.8 are:

• PEP 572, Assignment expressions
• PEP 570, Positional-only arguments
• PEP 587, Python Initialization Configuration (improved embedding)
• PEP 590, Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
• PEP 578, Runtime audit hooks
• PEP 574, Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data
• 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
• (Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Łukasz know.)

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

The next pre-release of Python 3.8 and the last beta will be 3.8.0b4, currently scheduled for 2019-08-26.

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 569, 3.8 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.
• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

MINSTREL (singing): Brave Sir Robin ran away
ROBIN: No!
MINSTREL: Bravely ran away away
ROBIN: I didn't!
MINSTREL: When danger reared its ugly head
MINSTREL: He bravely turned his tail and fled
ROBIN: No!
MINSTREL: Yes, Brave Sir Robin turned about
ROBIN: I didn't!
MINSTREL: And gallantly he chickened out
MINSTREL: Bravely taking to his feet
ROBIN: I never did!
MINSTREL: He beat a very brave retreat
ROBIN: Oh, lie!
MINSTREL: Bravest of the brave
MINSTREL: Sir Robin
ROBIN: I never!

Full Changelog