| Introduction | Python 3.12.0 released the second RC version and the last RC. The official version will be released on Monday, October 2, 2023. |
The development team stated that after entering the candidate version stage, only code that has been reviewed and has clear errors fixed will be accepted. RC2 is the last chance to find and fix important issues.
Starting with this release, there will be no ABI changes in the 3.12 series, and the goal is to change as little code as possible.
Some of the major new features and changes in Python 3.12:
- New type annotation syntax for generic classes (PEP 695)
- More flexible f-string parsing (PEP 701)
- Support buffer protocol (PEP 688)
- Improve error message
- Improve performance
- Support Linux perf analyzer reporting Python function names during tracing
- According to the PEP 623 proposal, the deprecated `wstr` and `wstr_length` members in the C language implementation of unicode objects have been deleted.
- In the `unittest` module, some long-deprecated methods and classes have been removed (they have been deprecated since Python 3.1 or 3.2)
- The deprecated `smtpd` and `distutilsd` modules have been removed (see PEP 594 and PEP 632), the setuptools package (installed by default in virtualenvs and many other places) continues to provide the `distutilsd` module
- Other old, broken, and deprecated functions, classes, and methods have also been removed
- The internal representation of integers has changed to prepare for performance enhancements (this will not affect most users as it is an internal detail change, but may cause problems with Cython-generated code)