- Editor
Elvis Pranskevichus <elvis@magic.io>
This article explains the new features in Python 3.7, compared to 3.6. Python 3.7 was released on June 27, 2018. For full details, see the changelog <changelog>.
New syntax features:
PEP 563 <whatsnew37-pep563>, postponed evaluation of type annotations.
Backwards incompatible syntax changes:
asyncandawaitare now reserved keywords.
New library modules:
contextvars:PEP 567 -- Context Variables <whatsnew37-pep567>dataclasses:PEP 557 -- Data Classes <whatsnew37-pep557>whatsnew37_importlib_resources
New built-in features:
PEP 553 <whatsnew37-pep553>, the newbreakpointfunction.
Python data model improvements:
PEP 562 <whatsnew37-pep562>, customization of access to module attributes.PEP 560 <whatsnew37-pep560>, core support for typing module and generic types.- the insertion-order preservation nature of
dict <typesmapping>objects has been declared to be an official part of the Python language spec.
Significant improvements in the standard library:
- The
asynciomodule has received new features, significantusability and performance improvements <whatsnew37_asyncio>. - The
timemodule gained support forfunctions with nanosecond resolution <whatsnew37-pep564>.
CPython implementation improvements:
- Avoiding the use of ASCII as a default text encoding:
PEP 538 <whatsnew37-pep538>, legacy C locale coercionPEP 540 <whatsnew37-pep540>, forced UTF-8 runtime mode
PEP 552 <whatsnew37-pep552>, deterministic .pycsthe new development runtime mode <whatsnew37-devmode>PEP 565 <whatsnew37-pep565>, improvedDeprecationWarninghandling
C API improvements:
PEP 539 <whatsnew37-pep539>, new C API for thread-local storage
Documentation improvements:
PEP 545 <whatsnew37-pep545>, Python documentation translations- New documentation translations: Japanese, French, and Korean.
This release features notable performance improvements in many areas. The whatsnew37-perf section lists them in detail.
For a list of changes that may affect compatibility with previous Python releases please refer to the porting-to-python-37 section.
The advent of type hints in Python uncovered two glaring usability issues with the functionality of annotations added in 3107 and refined further in 526:
- annotations could only use names which were already available in the current scope, in other words they didn't support forward references of any kind; and
- annotating source code had adverse effects on startup time of Python programs.
Both of these issues are fixed by postponing the evaluation of annotations. Instead of compiling code which executes expressions in annotations at their definition time, the compiler stores the annotation in a string form equivalent to the AST of the expression in question. If needed, annotations can be resolved at runtime using typing.get_type_hints. In the common case where this is not required, the annotations are cheaper to store (since short strings are interned by the interpreter) and make startup time faster.
Usability-wise, annotations now support forward references, making the following syntax valid:
class C:
@classmethod
def from_string(cls, source: str) -> C:
...
def validate_b(self, obj: B) -> bool:
...
class B:
...Since this change breaks compatibility, the new behavior needs to be enabled on a per-module basis in Python 3.7 using a __future__ import:
from __future__ import annotationsIt will become the default in Python 4.0.
563-- Postponed evaluation of annotationsPEP written and implemented by Łukasz Langa.
An ongoing challenge within the Python 3 series has been determining a sensible default strategy for handling the "7-bit ASCII" text encoding assumption currently implied by the use of the default C or POSIX locale on non-Windows platforms.
538 updates the default interpreter command line interface to automatically coerce that locale to an available UTF-8 based locale as described in the documentation of the new PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE environment variable. Automatically setting LC_CTYPE this way means that both the core interpreter and locale-aware C extensions (such as readline) will assume the use of UTF-8 as the default text encoding, rather than ASCII.
The platform support definition in 11 has also been updated to limit full text handling support to suitably configured non-ASCII based locales.
As part of this change, the default error handler for ~sys.stdin and ~sys.stdout is now surrogateescape (rather than strict) when using any of the defined coercion target locales (currently C.UTF-8, C.utf8, and UTF-8). The default error handler for ~sys.stderr continues to be backslashreplace, regardless of locale.
Locale coercion is silent by default, but to assist in debugging potentially locale related integration problems, explicit warnings (emitted directly on ~sys.stderr) can be requested by setting PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE=warn. This setting will also cause the Python runtime to emit a warning if the legacy C locale remains active when the core interpreter is initialized.
While 538's locale coercion has the benefit of also affecting extension modules (such as GNU readline), as well as child processes (including those running non-Python applications and older versions of Python), it has the downside of requiring that a suitable target locale be present on the running system. To better handle the case where no suitable target locale is available (as occurs on RHEL/CentOS 7, for example), Python 3.7 also implements whatsnew37-pep540.
538-- Coercing the legacy C locale to a UTF-8 based localePEP written and implemented by Nick Coghlan.
The new -X utf8 command line option and PYTHONUTF8 environment variable can be used to enable the CPython UTF-8 mode.
When in UTF-8 mode, CPython ignores the locale settings, and uses the UTF-8 encoding by default. The error handlers for sys.stdin and sys.stdout streams are set to surrogateescape.
The forced UTF-8 mode can be used to change the text handling behavior in an embedded Python interpreter without changing the locale settings of an embedding application.
While 540's UTF-8 mode has the benefit of working regardless of which locales are available on the running system, it has the downside of having no effect on extension modules (such as GNU readline), child processes running non-Python applications, and child processes running older versions of Python. To reduce the risk of corrupting text data when communicating with such components, Python 3.7 also implements whatsnew37-pep540).
The UTF-8 mode is enabled by default when the locale is C or POSIX, and the 538 locale coercion feature fails to change it to a UTF-8 based alternative (whether that failure is due to PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE=0 being set, LC_ALL being set, or the lack of a suitable target locale).
540-- Add a new UTF-8 modePEP written and implemented by Victor Stinner
Python 3.7 includes the new built-in breakpoint function as an easy and consistent way to enter the Python debugger.
Built-in breakpoint() calls sys.breakpointhook. By default, the latter imports pdb and then calls pdb.set_trace(), but by binding sys.breakpointhook() to the function of your choosing, breakpoint() can enter any debugger. Additionally, the environment variable PYTHONBREAKPOINT can be set to the callable of your debugger of choice. Set PYTHONBREAKPOINT=0 to completely disable built-in breakpoint().
553-- Built-in breakpoint()PEP written and implemented by Barry Warsaw
While Python provides a C API for thread-local storage support; the existing Thread Local Storage (TLS) API <thread-local-storage-api> has used :cint to represent TLS keys across all platforms. This has not generally been a problem for officially-support platforms, but that is neither POSIX-compliant, nor portable in any practical sense.
539 changes this by providing a new Thread Specific Storage (TSS)
API <thread-specific-storage-api> to CPython which supersedes use of the existing TLS API within the CPython interpreter, while deprecating the existing API. The TSS API uses a new type :cPy_tss_t instead of :cint to represent TSS keys--an opaque type the definition of which may depend on the underlying TLS implementation. Therefore, this will allow to build CPython on platforms where the native TLS key is defined in a way that cannot be safely cast to :cint.
Note that on platforms where the native TLS key is defined in a way that cannot be safely cast to :cint, all functions of the existing TLS API will be no-op and immediately return failure. This indicates clearly that the old API is not supported on platforms where it cannot be used reliably, and that no effort will be made to add such support.
539-- A New C-API for Thread-Local Storage in CPythonPEP written by Erik M. Bray; implementation by Masayuki Yamamoto.
Python 3.7 allows defining __getattr__ on modules and will call it whenever a module attribute is otherwise not found. Defining __dir__ on modules is now also allowed.
A typical example of where this may be useful is module attribute deprecation and lazy loading.
562-- Module__getattr__and__dir__PEP written and implemented by Ivan Levkivskyi
The resolution of clocks in modern systems can exceed the limited precision of a floating point number returned by the time.time function and its variants. To avoid loss of precision, 564 adds six new "nanosecond" variants of the existing timer functions to the time module:
time.clock_gettime_nstime.clock_settime_nstime.monotonic_nstime.perf_counter_nstime.process_time_nstime.time_ns
The new functions return the number of nanoseconds as an integer value.
Measurements show that on Linux and Windows the resolution of time.time_ns is approximately 3 times better than that of time.time.
564-- Add new time functions with nanosecond resolutionPEP written and implemented by Victor Stinner
The default handling of DeprecationWarning has been changed such that these warnings are once more shown by default, but only when the code triggering them is running directly in the __main__ module. As a result, developers of single file scripts and those using Python interactively should once again start seeing deprecation warnings for the APIs they use, but deprecation warnings triggered by imported application, library and framework modules will continue to be hidden by default.
As a result of this change, the standard library now allows developers to choose between three different deprecation warning behaviours:
FutureWarning: always displayed by default, recommended for warnings intended to be seen by application end users (e.g. for deprecated application configuration settings).DeprecationWarning: displayed by default only in__main__and when running tests, recommended for warnings intended to be seen by other Python developers where a version upgrade may result in changed behaviour or an error.PendingDeprecationWarning: displayed by default only when running tests, intended for cases where a future version upgrade will change the warning category toDeprecationWarningorFutureWarning.
Previously both DeprecationWarning and PendingDeprecationWarning were only visible when running tests, which meant that developers primarily writing single file scripts or using Python interactively could be surprised by breaking changes in the APIs they used.
565-- Show DeprecationWarning in__main__PEP written and implemented by Nick Coghlan
Initially 484 was designed in such way that it would not introduce any changes to the core CPython interpreter. Now type hints and the typing module are extensively used by the community, so this restriction is removed. The PEP introduces two special methods __class_getitem__ and __mro_entries__, these methods are now used by most classes and special constructs in typing. As a result, the speed of various operations with types increased up to 7 times, the generic types can be used without metaclass conflicts, and several long standing bugs in typing module are fixed.
560-- Core support for typing module and generic typesPEP written and implemented by Ivan Levkivskyi
Python has traditionally checked the up-to-dateness of bytecode cache files (i.e., .pyc files) by comparing the source metadata (last-modified timestamp and size) with source metadata saved in the cache file header when it was generated. While effective, this invalidation method has its drawbacks. When filesystem timestamps are too coarse, Python can miss source updates, leading to user confusion. Additionally, having a timestamp in the cache file is problematic for build reproducibility and content-based build systems.
552 extends the pyc format to allow the hash of the source file to be used for invalidation instead of the source timestamp. Such .pyc files are called "hash-based". By default, Python still uses timestamp-based invalidation and does not generate hash-based .pyc files at runtime. Hash-based .pyc files may be generated with py_compile or compileall.
Hash-based .pyc files come in two variants: checked and unchecked. Python validates checked hash-based .pyc files against the corresponding source files at runtime but doesn't do so for unchecked hash-based pycs. Unchecked hash-based .pyc files are a useful performance optimization for environments where a system external to Python (e.g., the build system) is responsible for keeping .pyc files up-to-date.
See pyc-invalidation for more information.
552-- Deterministic pycsPEP written and implemented by Benjamin Peterson
545 describes the process of creating and maintaining Python documentation translations.
Three new translations have been added:
- Japanese: https://docs.python.org/ja/
- French: https://docs.python.org/fr/
- Korean: https://docs.python.org/ko/
545-- Python Documentation TranslationsPEP written and implemented by Julien Palard, Inada Naoki, and Victor Stinner.
The new -X dev command line option or the new PYTHONDEVMODE environment variable can be used to enable CPython's development mode. When in development mode, CPython performs additional runtime checks that are too expensive to be enabled by default. See -X dev documentation for the full description of the effects of this mode.
- More than 255 arguments can now be passed to a function, and a function can now have more than 255 parameters. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in
12844and18896.) bytes.fromhexandbytearray.fromhexnow ignore all ASCII whitespace, not only spaces. (Contributed by Robert Xiao in28927.)str,bytes, andbytearraygained support for the newisascii() <str.isascii>method, which can be used to test if a string or bytes contain only the ASCII characters. (Contributed by INADA Naoki in32677.)ImportErrornow displays module name and module__file__path whenfrom ... import ...fails. (Contributed by Matthias Bussonnier in29546.)- Circular imports involving absolute imports with binding a submodule to a name are now supported. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in
30024.) object.__format__(x, '')is now equivalent tostr(x)rather thanformat(str(self), ''). (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in28974.)- In order to better support dynamic creation of stack traces,
types.TracebackTypecan now be instantiated from Python code, and thetb_nextattribute ontracebacks <traceback-objects>is now writable. (Contributed by Nathaniel J. Smith in30579.) - When using the
-mswitch,sys.path[0]is now eagerly expanded to the full starting directory path, rather than being left as the empty directory (which allows imports from the current working directory at the time when an import occurs) (Contributed by Nick Coghlan in33053.) - The new
-Ximporttimeoption or thePYTHONPROFILEIMPORTTIMEenvironment variable can be used to show the timing of each module import. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in31415.)
The new contextvars module and a set of new C APIs <contextvarsobjects> introduce support for context variables. Context variables are conceptually similar to thread-local variables. Unlike TLS, context variables support asynchronous code correctly.
The asyncio and decimal modules have been updated to use and support context variables out of the box. Particularly the active decimal context is now stored in a context variable, which allows decimal operations to work with the correct context in asynchronous code.
567-- Context VariablesPEP written and implemented by Yury Selivanov
The new ~dataclasses.dataclass decorator provides a way to declare data classes. A data class describes its attributes using class variable annotations. Its constructor and other magic methods, such as ~object.__repr__, ~object.__eq__, and ~object.__hash__ are generated automatically.
Example:
@dataclass
class Point:
x: float
y: float
z: float = 0.0
p = Point(1.5, 2.5)
print(p) # produces "Point(x=1.5, y=2.5, z=0.0)"557-- Data ClassesPEP written and implemented by Eric V. Smith
The new importlib.resources module provides several new APIs and one new ABC for access to, opening, and reading resources inside packages. Resources are roughly similar to files inside packages, but they needn't be actual files on the physical file system. Module loaders can provide a get_resource_reader() function which returns a importlib.abc.ResourceReader instance to support this new API. Built-in file path loaders and zip file loaders both support this.
Contributed by Barry Warsaw and Brett Cannon in 32248.
importlib_resources -- a PyPI backport for earlier Python versions.
The new ArgumentParser.parse_intermixed_args()
<argparse.ArgumentParser.parse_intermixed_args> method allows intermixing options and positional arguments. (Contributed by paul.j3 in 14191.)
The asyncio module has received many new features, usability and performance improvements <whatsnew37-asyncio-perf>. Notable changes include:
- The new
provisional <provisional api>asyncio.runfunction can be used to run a coroutine from synchronous code by automatically creating and destroying the event loop. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32314.) - asyncio gained support for
contextvars.loop.call_soon() <asyncio.loop.call_soon>,loop.call_soon_threadsafe() <asyncio.loop.call_soon_threadsafe>,loop.call_later() <asyncio.loop.call_later>,loop.call_at() <asyncio.loop.call_at>, andFuture.add_done_callback() <asyncio.Future.add_done_callback>have a new optional keyword-only context parameter.Tasks <asyncio.Task>now track their context automatically. See567for more details. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32436.) - The new
asyncio.create_taskfunction has been added as a shortcut toasyncio.get_event_loop().create_task(). (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32311.) - The new
loop.start_tls() <asyncio.loop.start_tls>method can be used to upgrade an existing connection to TLS. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in23749.) - The new
loop.sock_recv_into() <asyncio.loop.sock_recv_into>method allows reading data from a socket directly into a provided buffer making it possible to reduce data copies. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in31819.) - The new
asyncio.current_taskfunction returns the currently running~asyncio.Taskinstance, and the newasyncio.all_tasksfunction returns a set of all existingTaskinstances in a given loop. TheTask.current_task() <asyncio.Task.current_task>andTask.all_tasks() <asyncio.Task.all_tasks>methods have been deprecated. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32250.) - The new provisional
~asyncio.BufferedProtocolclass allows implementing streaming protocols with manual control over the receive buffer. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32251.) - The new
asyncio.get_running_loopfunction returns the currently running loop, and raises aRuntimeErrorif no loop is running. This is in contrast withasyncio.get_event_loop, which will create a new event loop if none is running. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32269.) - The new
StreamWriter.wait_closed() <asyncio.StreamWriter.wait_closed>coroutine method allows waiting until the stream writer is closed. The newStreamWriter.is_closing() <asyncio.StreamWriter.is_closing>method can be used to determine if the writer is closing. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32391.) - The new
loop.sock_sendfile() <asyncio.loop.sock_sendfile>coroutine method allows sending files usingos.sendfilewhen possible. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32410.) - The new
Future.get_loop() <asyncio.Future.get_loop>andTask.get_loop()methods return the instance of the loop on which a task or a future were created.Server.get_loop() <asyncio.Server.get_loop>allows doing the same forasyncio.Serverobjects. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32415and Srinivas Reddy Thatiparthy in32418.) It is now possible to control how instances of
asyncio.Serverbegin serving. Previously, the server would start serving immediately when created. The new start_serving keyword argument toloop.create_server() <asyncio.loop.create_server>andloop.create_unix_server() <asyncio.loop.create_unix_server>, as well asServer.start_serving() <asyncio.Server.start_serving>, andServer.serve_forever() <asyncio.Server.serve_forever>can be used to decouple server instantiation and serving. The newServer.is_serving() <asyncio.Server.is_serving>method returnsTrueif the server is serving.~asyncio.Serverobjects are now asynchronous context managers:srv = await loop.create_server(...) async with srv: # some code # At this point, srv is closed and no longer accepts new connections.(Contributed by Yury Selivanov in
32662.)- Callback objects returned by
loop.call_later() <asyncio.loop.call_later>gained the newwhen() <asyncio.TimerHandle.when>method which returns an absolute scheduled callback timestamp. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32741.) - The :meth:`loop.create_datagram_endpoint() <asyncio.loop.create_datagram_endpoint> method gained support for Unix sockets. (Contributed by Quentin Dawans in :issue:`31245.)
- The
asyncio.open_connection,asyncio.start_serverfunctions,loop.create_connection() <asyncio.loop.create_connection>,loop.create_server() <asyncio.loop.create_server>,loop.create_accepted_socket() <asyncio.loop.connect_accepted_socket>methods and their corresponding UNIX socket variants now accept the ssl_handshake_timeout keyword argument. (Contributed by Neil Aspinall in29970.) - The new
Handle.cancelled() <asyncio.Handle.cancelled>method returnsTrueif the callback was cancelled. (Contributed by Marat Sharafutdinov in31943.) - The asyncio source has been converted to use the
async/awaitsyntax. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32193.) - The new
ReadTransport.is_reading() <asyncio.ReadTransport.is_reading>method can be used to determine the reading state of the transport. Additionally, calls toReadTransport.resume_reading() <asyncio.ReadTransport.resume_reading>andReadTransport.pause_reading() <asyncio.ReadTransport.pause_reading>are now idempotent. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32356.) - Loop methods which accept socket paths now support passing
path-like objects <path-like object>. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32066.) - In
asyncioTCP sockets on Linux are now created withTCP_NODELAYflag set by default. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov and Victor Stinner in27456.) - Exceptions occurring in cancelled tasks are no longer logged. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in
30508.) - New
WindowsSelectorEventLoopPolicyandWindowsProactorEventLoopPolicyclasses. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in33792.)
Several asyncio APIs have been deprecated <whatsnew37-asyncio-deprecated>.
The ~binascii.b2a_uu function now accepts an optional backtick keyword argument. When it's true, zeros are represented by '`' instead of spaces. (Contributed by Xiang Zhang in 30103.)
The ~calendar.HTMLCalendar class has new class attributes which ease the customization of CSS classes in the produced HTML calendar. (Contributed by Oz Tiram in 30095.)
collections.namedtuple() now supports default values. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in 32320.)
compileall.compile_dir learned the new invalidation_mode parameter, which can be used to enable hash-based .pyc invalidation <whatsnew37-pep552>. The invalidation mode can also be specified on the command line using the new --invalidation-mode argument. (Contributed by Benjamin Peterson in 31650.)
ProcessPoolExecutor <concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor> and ThreadPoolExecutor <concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor> now support the new initializer and initargs constructor arguments. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 21423.)
The ProcessPoolExecutor <concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor> can now take the multiprocessing context via the new mp_context argument. (Contributed by Thomas Moreau in 31540.)
The new ~contextlib.nullcontext is a simpler and faster no-op context manager than ~contextlib.ExitStack. (Contributed by Jesse-Bakker in 10049.)
The new ~contextlib.asynccontextmanager, ~contextlib.AbstractAsyncContextManager, and ~contextlib.AsyncExitStack have been added to complement their synchronous counterparts. (Contributed by Jelle Zijlstra in 29679 and 30241, and by Alexander Mohr and Ilya Kulakov in 29302.)
The cProfile command line now accepts -m module_name as an alternative to script path. (Contributed by Sanyam Khurana in 21862.)
The crypt module now supports the Blowfish hashing method. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 31664.)
The ~crypt.mksalt function now allows specifying the number of rounds for hashing. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 31702.)
The new datetime.fromisoformat() <datetime.datetime.fromisoformat> method constructs a ~datetime.datetime object from a string in one of the formats output by datetime.isoformat() <datetime.datetime.isoformat>. (Contributed by Paul Ganssle in 15873.)
The tzinfo <datetime.tzinfo> class now supports sub-minute offsets. (Contributed by Alexander Belopolsky in 5288.)
dbm.dumb now supports reading read-only files and no longer writes the index file when it is not changed.
The decimal module now uses context variables <whatsnew37-pep567> to store the decimal context. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in 32630.)
The ~dis.dis function is now able to disassemble nested code objects (the code of comprehensions, generator expressions and nested functions, and the code used for building nested classes). The maximum depth of disassembly recursion is controlled by the new depth parameter. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 11822.)
README.rst is now included in the list of distutils standard READMEs and therefore included in source distributions. (Contributed by Ryan Gonzalez in 11913.)
The Enum <enum.Enum> learned the new _ignore_ class property, which allows listing the names of properties which should not become enum members. (Contributed by Ethan Furman in 31801.)
In Python 3.8, attempting to check for non-Enum objects in Enum classes will raise a TypeError (e.g. 1 in Color); similarly, attempting to check for non-Flag objects in a Flag member will raise TypeError (e.g. 1 in Perm.RW); currently, both operations return False instead and are deprecated. (Contributed by Ethan Furman in 33217.)
functools.singledispatch now supports registering implementations using type annotations. (Contributed by Łukasz Langa in 32227.)
The new gc.freeze function allows freezing all objects tracked by the garbage collector and excluding them from future collections. This can be used before a POSIX fork() call to make the GC copy-on-write friendly or to speed up collection. The new gc.unfreeze functions reverses this operation. Additionally, gc.get_freeze_count can be used to obtain the number of frozen objects. (Contributed by Li Zekun in 31558.)
The hmac module now has an optimized one-shot ~hmac.digest function, which is up to three times faster than ~hmac.HMAC. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 32433.)
~http.client.HTTPConnection and ~http.client.HTTPSConnection now support the new blocksize argument for improved upload throughput. (Contributed by Nir Soffer in 31945.)
~http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler now supports the HTTP If-Modified-Since header. The server returns the 304 response status if the target file was not modified after the time specified in the header. (Contributed by Pierre Quentel in 29654.)
~http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler accepts the new directory argument, in addition to the new --directory command line argument. With this parameter, the server serves the specified directory, by default it uses the current working directory. (Contributed by Stéphane Wirtel and Julien Palard in 28707.)
The new ThreadingHTTPServer <http.server.ThreadingHTTPServer> class uses threads to handle requests using ~socketserver.ThreadingMixin. It is used when http.server is run with -m. (Contributed by Julien Palard in 31639.)
Multiple fixes for autocompletion. (Contributed by Louie Lu in 15786.)
Module Browser (on the File menu, formerly called Class Browser), now displays nested functions and classes in addition to top-level functions and classes. (Contributed by Guilherme Polo, Cheryl Sabella, and Terry Jan Reedy in 1612262.)
The Settings dialog (Options, Configure IDLE) has been partly rewritten to improve both appearance and function. (Contributed by Cheryl Sabella and Terry Jan Reedy in multiple issues.)
The font sample now includes a selection of non-Latin characters so that users can better see the effect of selecting a particular font. (Contributed by Terry Jan Reedy in 13802.) The sample can be edited to include other characters. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 31860.)
The IDLE features formerly implemented as extensions have been reimplemented as normal features. Their settings have been moved from the Extensions tab to other dialog tabs. (Contributed by Charles Wohlganger and Terry Jan Reedy in 27099.)
Editor code context option revised. Box displays all context lines up to maxlines. Clicking on a context line jumps the editor to that line. Context colors for custom themes is added to Highlights tab of Settings dialog. (Contributed by Cheryl Sabella and Terry Jan Reedy in 33642, 33768, and 33679.)
On Windows, a new API call tells Windows that tk scales for DPI. On Windows 8.1+ or 10, with DPI compatibility properties of the Python binary unchanged, and a monitor resolution greater than 96 DPI, this should make text and lines sharper. It should otherwise have no effect. (Contributed by Terry Jan Reedy in 33656.)
New in 3.7.1:
Output over N lines (50 by default) is squeezed down to a button. N can be changed in the PyShell section of the General page of the Settings dialog. Fewer, but possibly extra long, lines can be squeezed by right clicking on the output. Squeezed output can be expanded in place by double-clicking the button or into the clipboard or a separate window by right-clicking the button. (Contributed by Tal Einat in 1529353.)
The changes above have been backported to 3.6 maintenance releases.
NEW in 3.7.4:
Add "Run Customized" to the Run menu to run a module with customized settings. Any command line arguments entered are added to sys.argv. They re-appear in the box for the next customized run. One can also suppress the normal Shell main module restart. (Contributed by Cheryl Sabella, Terry Jan Reedy, and others in 5680 and 37627.)
New in 3.7.5:
Add optional line numbers for IDLE editor windows. Windows open without line numbers unless set otherwise in the General tab of the configuration dialog. Line numbers for an existing window are shown and hidden in the Options menu. (Contributed by Tal Einat and Saimadhav Heblikar in 17535.)
The importlib.abc.ResourceReader ABC was introduced to support the loading of resources from packages. See also whatsnew37_importlib_resources. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw, Brett Cannon in 32248.)
importlib.reload now raises ModuleNotFoundError if the module lacks a spec. (Contributed by Garvit Khatri in 29851.)
importlib.find_spec now raises ModuleNotFoundError instead of AttributeError if the specified parent module is not a package (i.e. lacks a __path__ attribute). (Contributed by Milan Oberkirch in 30436.)
The new importlib.source_hash can be used to compute the hash of the passed source. A hash-based .pyc file <whatsnew37-pep552> embeds the value returned by this function.
The new TextIOWrapper.reconfigure() <io.TextIOWrapper.reconfigure> method can be used to reconfigure the text stream with the new settings. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 30526 and INADA Naoki in 15216.)
The new subnet_of() and supernet_of() methods of ipaddress.IPv6Network and ipaddress.IPv4Network can be used for network containment tests. (Contributed by Michel Albert and Cheryl Sabella in 20825.)
itertools.islice now accepts integer-like objects <object.__index__> as start, stop, and slice arguments. (Contributed by Will Roberts in 30537.)
The new monetary argument to locale.format_string can be used to make the conversion use monetary thousands separators and grouping strings. (Contributed by Garvit in 10379.)
The locale.getpreferredencoding function now always returns 'UTF-8' on Android or when in the forced UTF-8 mode <whatsnew37-pep540>.
~logging.Logger instances can now be pickled. (Contributed by Vinay Sajip in 30520.)
The new StreamHandler.setStream() <logging.StreamHandler.setStream> method can be used to replace the logger stream after handler creation. (Contributed by Vinay Sajip in 30522.)
It is now possible to specify keyword arguments to handler constructors in configuration passed to logging.config.fileConfig. (Contributed by Preston Landers in 31080.)
The new math.remainder function implements the IEEE 754-style remainder operation. (Contributed by Mark Dickinson in 29962.)
The MIME type of .bmp has been changed from 'image/x-ms-bmp' to 'image/bmp'. (Contributed by Nitish Chandra in 22589.)
The new Database.Close() <msilib.Database.Close> method can be used to close the MSI database. (Contributed by Berker Peksag in 20486.)
The new Process.close() <multiprocessing.Process.close> method explicitly closes the process object and releases all resources associated with it. ValueError is raised if the underlying process is still running. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 30596.)
The new Process.kill() <multiprocessing.Process.kill> method can be used to terminate the process using the SIGKILL signal on Unix. (Contributed by Vitor Pereira in 30794.)
Non-daemonic threads created by ~multiprocessing.Process are now joined on process exit. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 18966.)
os.fwalk now accepts the path argument as bytes. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28682.)
os.scandir gained support for file descriptors <path_fd>. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 25996.)
The new ~os.register_at_fork function allows registering Python callbacks to be executed at process fork. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 16500.)
Added os.preadv (combine the functionality of os.readv and os.pread) and os.pwritev functions (combine the functionality of os.writev and os.pwrite). (Contributed by Pablo Galindo in 31368.)
The mode argument of os.makedirs no longer affects the file permission bits of newly-created intermediate-level directories. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 19930.)
os.dup2 now returns the new file descriptor. Previously, None was always returned. (Contributed by Benjamin Peterson in 32441.)
The structure returned by os.stat now contains the ~os.stat_result.st_fstype attribute on Solaris and its derivatives. (Contributed by Jesús Cea Avión in 32659.)
The new Path.is_mount() <pathlib.Path.is_mount> method is now available on POSIX systems and can be used to determine whether a path is a mount point. (Contributed by Cooper Ry Lees in 30897.)
pdb.set_trace now takes an optional header keyword-only argument. If given, it is printed to the console just before debugging begins. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw in 31389.)
pdb command line now accepts -m module_name as an alternative to script file. (Contributed by Mario Corchero in 32206.)
py_compile.compile -- and by extension, compileall -- now respects the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable by unconditionally creating .pyc files for hash-based validation. This allows for guaranteeing reproducible builds of .pyc files when they are created eagerly. (Contributed by Bernhard M. Wiedemann in 29708.)
The pydoc server can now bind to an arbitrary hostname specified by the new -n command-line argument. (Contributed by Feanil Patel in 31128.)
The new ~queue.SimpleQueue class is an unbounded FIFO queue. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 14976.)
The flags re.ASCII, re.LOCALE and re.UNICODE can be set within the scope of a group. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 31690.)
re.split now supports splitting on a pattern like r'\b', '^$' or (?=-) that matches an empty string. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 25054.)
Regular expressions compiled with the re.LOCALE flag no longer depend on the locale at compile time. Locale settings are applied only when the compiled regular expression is used. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 30215.)
FutureWarning is now emitted if a regular expression contains character set constructs that will change semantically in the future, such as nested sets and set operations. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 30349.)
Compiled regular expression and match objects can now be copied using copy.copy and copy.deepcopy. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 10076.)
The new warn_on_full_buffer argument to the signal.set_wakeup_fd function makes it possible to specify whether Python prints a warning on stderr when the wakeup buffer overflows. (Contributed by Nathaniel J. Smith in 30050.)
The new socket.getblocking() <socket.socket.getblocking> method returns True if the socket is in blocking mode and False otherwise. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in 32373.)
The new socket.close function closes the passed socket file descriptor. This function should be used instead of os.close for better compatibility across platforms. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 32454.)
The socket module now exposes the socket.TCP_CONGESTION (Linux 2.6.13), socket.TCP_USER_TIMEOUT (Linux 2.6.37), and socket.TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT (Linux 3.12) constants. (Contributed by Omar Sandoval in 26273 and Nathaniel J. Smith in 29728.)
Support for socket.AF_VSOCK sockets has been added to allow communication between virtual machines and their hosts. (Contributed by Cathy Avery in 27584.)
Sockets now auto-detect family, type and protocol from file descriptor by default. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 28134.)
socketserver.ThreadingMixIn.server_close now waits until all non-daemon threads complete. socketserver.ForkingMixIn.server_close now waits until all child processes complete.
Add a new socketserver.ForkingMixIn.block_on_close class attribute to socketserver.ForkingMixIn and socketserver.ThreadingMixIn classes. Set the class attribute to False to get the pre-3.7 behaviour.
sqlite3.Connection now exposes the ~sqlite3.Connection.backup method when the underlying SQLite library is at version 3.6.11 or higher. (Contributed by Lele Gaifax in 27645.)
The database argument of sqlite3.connect now accepts any path-like object, instead of just a string. (Contributed by Anders Lorentsen in 31843.)
The ssl module now uses OpenSSL's builtin API instead of ~ssl.match_hostname to check a host name or an IP address. Values are validated during TLS handshake. Any certificate validation error including failing the host name check now raises ~ssl.SSLCertVerificationError and aborts the handshake with a proper TLS Alert message. The new exception contains additional information. Host name validation can be customized with SSLContext.hostname_checks_common_name <ssl.SSLContext.hostname_checks_common_name>. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 31399.)
Note
The improved host name check requires a libssl implementation compatible with OpenSSL 1.0.2 or 1.1. Consequently, OpenSSL 0.9.8 and 1.0.1 are no longer supported (see 37-platform-support-removals for more details). The ssl module is mostly compatible with LibreSSL 2.7.2 and newer.
The ssl module no longer sends IP addresses in SNI TLS extension. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 32185.)
~ssl.match_hostname no longer supports partial wildcards like www*.example.org. (Contributed by Mandeep Singh in 23033 and Christian Heimes in 31399.)
The default cipher suite selection of the ssl module now uses a blacklist approach rather than a hard-coded whitelist. Python no longer re-enables ciphers that have been blocked by OpenSSL security updates. Default cipher suite selection can be configured at compile time. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 31429.)
Validation of server certificates containing internationalized domain names (IDNs) is now supported. As part of this change, the SSLSocket.server_hostname <ssl.SSLSocket.server_hostname> attribute now stores the expected hostname in A-label form ("xn--pythn-mua.org"), rather than the U-label form ("pythön.org"). (Contributed by Nathaniel J. Smith and Christian Heimes in 28414.)
The ssl module has preliminary and experimental support for TLS 1.3 and OpenSSL 1.1.1. At the time of Python 3.7.0 release, OpenSSL 1.1.1 is still under development and TLS 1.3 hasn't been finalized yet. The TLS 1.3 handshake and protocol behaves slightly differently than TLS 1.2 and earlier, see ssl-tlsv1_3. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 32947, 20995, 29136, 30622 and 33618)
~ssl.SSLSocket and ~ssl.SSLObject no longer have a public constructor. Direct instantiation was never a documented and supported feature. Instances must be created with ~ssl.SSLContext methods ~ssl.SSLContext.wrap_socket and ~ssl.SSLContext.wrap_bio. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 32951)
OpenSSL 1.1 APIs for setting the minimum and maximum TLS protocol version are available as SSLContext.minimum_version <ssl.SSLContext.minimum_version> and SSLContext.maximum_version <ssl.SSLContext.maximum_version>. Supported protocols are indicated by several new flags, such as ~ssl.HAS_TLSv1_1. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 32609.)
string.Template now lets you to optionally modify the regular expression pattern for braced placeholders and non-braced placeholders separately. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw in 1198569.)
The subprocess.run function accepts the new capture_output keyword argument. When true, stdout and stderr will be captured. This is equivalent to passing subprocess.PIPE as stdout and stderr arguments. (Contributed by Bo Bayles in 32102.)
The subprocess.run function and the subprocess.Popen constructor now accept the text keyword argument as an alias to universal_newlines. (Contributed by Andrew Clegg in 31756.)
On Windows the default for close_fds was changed from False to True when redirecting the standard handles. It's now possible to set close_fds to true when redirecting the standard handles. See subprocess.Popen. This means that close_fds now defaults to True on all supported platforms. (Contributed by Segev Finer in 19764.)
The subprocess module is now more graceful when handling KeyboardInterrupt during subprocess.call, subprocess.run, or in a ~subprocess.Popen context manager. It now waits a short amount of time for the child to exit, before continuing the handling of the KeyboardInterrupt exception. (Contributed by Gregory P. Smith in 25942.)
The new sys.breakpointhook hook function is called by the built-in breakpoint. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw in 31353.)
On Android, the new sys.getandroidapilevel returns the build-time Android API version. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in 28740.)
The new sys.get_coroutine_origin_tracking_depth function returns the current coroutine origin tracking depth, as set by the new sys.set_coroutine_origin_tracking_depth. asyncio has been converted to use this new API instead of the deprecated sys.set_coroutine_wrapper. (Contributed by Nathaniel J. Smith in 32591.)
564 adds six new functions with nanosecond resolution to the time module:
time.clock_gettime_nstime.clock_settime_nstime.monotonic_nstime.perf_counter_nstime.process_time_nstime.time_ns
New clock identifiers have been added:
time.CLOCK_BOOTTIME(Linux): Identical totime.CLOCK_MONOTONIC, except it also includes any time that the system is suspended.time.CLOCK_PROF(FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD): High-resolution per-process CPU timer.time.CLOCK_UPTIME(FreeBSD, OpenBSD): Time whose absolute value is the time the system has been running and not suspended, providing accurate uptime measurement.
The new time.thread_time and time.thread_time_ns functions can be used to get per-thread CPU time measurements. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 32025.)
The new time.pthread_getcpuclockid function returns the clock ID of the thread-specific CPU-time clock.
The new tkinter.ttk.Spinbox class is now available. (Contributed by Alan Moore in 32585.)
tracemalloc.Traceback behaves more like regular tracebacks, sorting the frames from oldest to most recent. Traceback.format() <tracemalloc.Traceback.format> now accepts negative limit, truncating the result to the abs(limit) oldest frames. To get the old behaviour, use the new most_recent_first argument to Traceback.format(). (Contributed by Jesse Bakker in 32121.)
The new ~types.WrapperDescriptorType, ~types.MethodWrapperType, ~types.MethodDescriptorType, and ~types.ClassMethodDescriptorType classes are now available. (Contributed by Manuel Krebber and Guido van Rossum in 29377, and Serhiy Storchaka in 32265.)
The new types.resolve_bases function resolves MRO entries dynamically as specified by 560. (Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in 32717.)
The internal unicodedata database has been upgraded to use Unicode 11. (Contributed by Benjamin Peterson.)
The new -k command-line option allows filtering tests by a name substring or a Unix shell-like pattern. For example, python -m unittest -k foo runs foo_tests.SomeTest.test_something, bar_tests.SomeTest.test_foo, but not bar_tests.FooTest.test_something. (Contributed by Jonas Haag in 32071.)
The ~unittest.mock.sentinel attributes now preserve their identity when they are copied <copy> or pickled <pickle>. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 20804.)
The new ~unittest.mock.seal function allows sealing ~unittest.mock.Mock instances, which will disallow further creation of attribute mocks. The seal is applied recursively to all attributes that are themselves mocks. (Contributed by Mario Corchero in 30541.)
urllib.parse.quote has been updated from 2396 to 3986, adding ~ to the set of characters that are never quoted by default. (Contributed by Christian Theune and Ratnadeep Debnath in 16285.)
The uu.encode function now accepts an optional backtick keyword argument. When it's true, zeros are represented by '`' instead of spaces. (Contributed by Xiang Zhang in 30103.)
The new UUID.is_safe <uuid.UUID.is_safe> attribute relays information from the platform about whether generated UUIDs are generated with a multiprocessing-safe method. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw in 22807.)
uuid.getnode now prefers universally administered MAC addresses over locally administered MAC addresses. This makes a better guarantee for global uniqueness of UUIDs returned from uuid.uuid1. If only locally administered MAC addresses are available, the first such one found is returned. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw in 32107.)
The initialization of the default warnings filters has changed as follows:
- warnings enabled via command line options (including those for
-band the new CPython-specific-Xdevoption) are always passed to the warnings machinery via thesys.warnoptionsattribute. warnings filters enabled via the command line or the environment now have the following order of precedence:
- the
BytesWarningfilter for-b(or-bb) - any filters specified with the
-Woption - any filters specified with the
PYTHONWARNINGSenvironment variable - any other CPython specific filters (e.g. the
defaultfilter added for the new-X devmode) - any implicit filters defined directly by the warnings machinery
- the
- in CPython debug builds, all warnings are now displayed by default (the implicit filter list is empty)
(Contributed by Nick Coghlan and Victor Stinner in 20361, 32043, and 32230.)
Deprecation warnings are once again shown by default in single-file scripts and at the interactive prompt. See whatsnew37-pep565 for details. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan in 31975.)
ElementPath <elementtree-xpath> predicates in the find methods can now compare text of the current node with [. = "text"], not only text in children. Predicates also allow adding spaces for better readability. (Contributed by Stefan Behnel in 31648.)
SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher.register_function <xmlrpc.server.SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher> can now be used as a decorator. (Contributed by Xiang Zhang in 7769.)
Function ~zipapp.create_archive now accepts an optional filter argument to allow the user to select which files should be included in the archive. (Contributed by Irmen de Jong in 31072.)
Function ~zipapp.create_archive now accepts an optional compressed argument to generate a compressed archive. A command line option --compress has also been added to support compression. (Contributed by Zhiming Wang in 31638.)
~zipfile.ZipFile now accepts the new compresslevel parameter to control the compression level. (Contributed by Bo Bayles in 21417.)
Subdirectories in archives created by ZipFile are now stored in alphabetical order. (Contributed by Bernhard M. Wiedemann in 30693.)
A new API for thread-local storage has been implemented. See whatsnew37-pep539 for an overview and thread-specific-storage-api for a complete reference. (Contributed by Masayuki Yamamoto in 25658.)
The new context variables <whatsnew37-pep567> functionality exposes a number of new C APIs <contextvarsobjects>.
The new :cPyImport_GetModule function returns the previously imported module with the given name. (Contributed by Eric Snow in 28411.)
The new :cPy_RETURN_RICHCOMPARE macro eases writing rich comparison functions. (Contributed by Petr Victorin in 23699.)
The new :cPy_UNREACHABLE macro can be used to mark unreachable code paths. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw in 31338.)
The tracemalloc now exposes a C API through the new :cPyTraceMalloc_Track and :cPyTraceMalloc_Untrack functions. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in 30054.)
The new :cimport__find__load__start and :cimport__find__load__done static markers can be used to trace module imports. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 31574.)
The fields :cname and :cdoc of structures :cPyMemberDef, :cPyGetSetDef, :cPyStructSequence_Field, :cPyStructSequence_Desc, and :cwrapperbase are now of type const char * rather of char *. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28761.)
The result of :cPyUnicode_AsUTF8AndSize and :cPyUnicode_AsUTF8 is now of type const char * rather of char *. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28769.)
The result of :cPyMapping_Keys, :cPyMapping_Values and :cPyMapping_Items is now always a list, rather than a list or a tuple. (Contributed by Oren Milman in 28280.)
Added functions :cPySlice_Unpack and :cPySlice_AdjustIndices. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 27867.)
:cPyOS_AfterFork is deprecated in favour of the new functions :cPyOS_BeforeFork, :cPyOS_AfterFork_Parent and :cPyOS_AfterFork_Child. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 16500.)
The PyExc_RecursionErrorInst singleton that was part of the public API has been removed as its members being never cleared may cause a segfault during finalization of the interpreter. Contributed by Xavier de Gaye in 22898 and 30697.
Added C API support for timezones with timezone constructors :cPyTimeZone_FromOffset and :cPyTimeZone_FromOffsetAndName, and access to the UTC singleton with :cPyDateTime_TimeZone_UTC. Contributed by Paul Ganssle in 10381.
The type of results of :cPyThread_start_new_thread and :cPyThread_get_thread_ident, and the id parameter of :cPyThreadState_SetAsyncExc changed from :clong to :cunsigned long. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 6532.)
:cPyUnicode_AsWideCharString now raises a ValueError if the second argument is NULL and the :cwchar_t* string contains null characters. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 30708.)
Changes to the startup sequence and the management of dynamic memory allocators mean that the long documented requirement to call :cPy_Initialize before calling most C API functions is now relied on more heavily, and failing to abide by it may lead to segfaults in embedding applications. See the porting-to-python-37 section in this document and the pre-init-safe section in the C API documentation for more details.
The new :cPyInterpreterState_GetID returns the unique ID for a given interpreter. (Contributed by Eric Snow in 29102.)
:cPy_DecodeLocale, :cPy_EncodeLocale now use the UTF-8 encoding when the UTF-8 mode <whatsnew37-pep540> is enabled. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in 29240.)
:cPyUnicode_DecodeLocaleAndSize and :cPyUnicode_EncodeLocale now use the current locale encoding for surrogateescape error handler. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in 29240.)
The start and end parameters of :cPyUnicode_FindChar are now adjusted to behave like string slices. (Contributed by Xiang Zhang in 28822.)
Support for building --without-threads has been removed. The threading module is now always available. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 31370.).
A full copy of libffi is no longer bundled for use when building the _ctypes <ctypes> module on non-OSX UNIX platforms. An installed copy of libffi is now required when building _ctypes on such platforms. (Contributed by Zachary Ware in 27979.)
The Windows build process no longer depends on Subversion to pull in external sources, a Python script is used to download zipfiles from GitHub instead. If Python 3.6 is not found on the system (via py -3.6), NuGet is used to download a copy of 32-bit Python for this purpose. (Contributed by Zachary Ware in 30450.)
The ssl module requires OpenSSL 1.0.2 or 1.1 compatible libssl. OpenSSL 1.0.1 has reached end of lifetime on 2016-12-31 and is no longer supported. LibreSSL is temporarily not supported as well. LibreSSL releases up to version 2.6.4 are missing required OpenSSL 1.0.2 APIs.
The overhead of calling many methods of various standard library classes implemented in C has been significantly reduced by porting more code to use the METH_FASTCALL convention. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in 29300, 29507, 29452, and 29286.)
Various optimizations have reduced Python startup time by 10% on Linux and up to 30% on macOS. (Contributed by Victor Stinner, INADA Naoki in 29585, and Ivan Levkivskyi in 31333.)
Method calls are now up to 20% faster due to the bytecode changes which avoid creating bound method instances. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov and INADA Naoki in 26110.)
The asyncio module received a number of notable optimizations for commonly used functions:
- The
asyncio.get_event_loopfunction has been reimplemented in C to make it up to 15 times faster. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32296.) asyncio.Futurecallback management has been optimized. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32348.)asyncio.gatheris now up to 15% faster. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32355.)asyncio.sleepis now up to 2 times faster when the delay argument is zero or negative. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in32351.)- The performance overhead of asyncio debug mode has been reduced. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in
31970.)
As a result of PEP 560 work <whatsnew37-pep560>, the import time of typing has been reduced by a factor of 7, and many typing operations are now faster. (Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in 32226.)
sorted and list.sort have been optimized for common cases to be up to 40-75% faster. (Contributed by Elliot Gorokhovsky in 28685.)
dict.copy is now up to 5.5 times faster. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in 31179.)
hasattr and getattr are now about 4 times faster when name is not found and obj does not override object.__getattr__ or object.__getattribute__. (Contributed by INADA Naoki in 32544.)
Searching for certain Unicode characters (like Ukrainian capital "Є") in a string was up to 25 times slower than searching for other characters. It is now only 3 times slower in the worst case. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 24821.)
The collections.namedtuple factory has been reimplemented to make the creation of named tuples 4 to 6 times faster. (Contributed by Jelle Zijlstra with further improvements by INADA Naoki, Serhiy Storchaka, and Raymond Hettinger in 28638.)
date.fromordinal and date.fromtimestamp are now up to 30% faster in the common case. (Contributed by Paul Ganssle in 32403.)
The os.fwalk function is now up to 2 times faster thanks to the use of os.scandir. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 25996.)
The speed of the shutil.rmtree function has been improved by 20--40% thanks to the use of the os.scandir function. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28564.)
Optimized case-insensitive matching and searching of regular
expressions <re>. Searching some patterns can now be up to 20 times faster. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 30285.)
re.compile now converts flags parameter to int object if it is RegexFlag. It is now as fast as Python 3.5, and faster than Python 3.6 by about 10% depending on the pattern. (Contributed by INADA Naoki in 31671.)
The ~selectors.BaseSelector.modify methods of classes selectors.EpollSelector, selectors.PollSelector and selectors.DevpollSelector may be around 10% faster under heavy loads. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodola' in 30014)
Constant folding has been moved from the peephole optimizer to the new AST optimizer, which is able perform optimizations more consistently. (Contributed by Eugene Toder and INADA Naoki in 29469 and 11549.)
Most functions and methods in abc have been rewritten in C. This makes creation of abstract base classes, and calling isinstance and issubclass on them 1.5x faster. This also reduces Python start-up time by up to 10%. (Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi and INADA Naoki in 31333)
Significant speed improvements to alternate constructors for datetime.date and datetime.datetime by using fast-path constructors when not constructing subclasses. (Contributed by Paul Ganssle in 32403)
The speed of comparison of array.array instances has been improved considerably in certain cases. It is now from 10x to 70x faster when comparing arrays holding values of the same integer type. (Contributed by Adrian Wielgosik in 24700.)
The math.erf and math.erfc functions now use the (faster) C library implementation on most platforms. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 26121.)
- Trace hooks may now opt out of receiving the
lineand opt into receiving theopcodeevents from the interpreter by setting the corresponding newf_trace_linesandf_trace_opcodesattributes on the frame being traced. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan in31344.) - Fixed some consistency problems with namespace package module attributes. Namespace module objects now have an
__file__that is set toNone(previously unset), and their__spec__.originis also set toNone(previously the string"namespace"). See32305. Also, the namespace module object's__spec__.loaderis set to the same value as__loader__(previously, the former was set toNone). See32303. - The
localsdictionary now displays in the lexical order that variables were defined. Previously, the order was undefined. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in32690.) - The
distutilsuploadcommand no longer tries to change CR end-of-line characters to CRLF. This fixes a corruption issue with sdists that ended with a byte equivalent to CR. (Contributed by Bo Bayles in32304.)
Yield expressions (both yield and yield from clauses) are now deprecated in comprehensions and generator expressions (aside from the iterable expression in the leftmost !for clause). This ensures that comprehensions always immediately return a container of the appropriate type (rather than potentially returning a generator iterator object), while generator expressions won't attempt to interleave their implicit output with the output from any explicit yield expressions. In Python 3.7, such expressions emit DeprecationWarning when compiled, in Python 3.8 this will be a SyntaxError. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 10544.)
Returning a subclass of complex from object.__complex__ is deprecated and will be an error in future Python versions. This makes __complex__() consistent with object.__int__ and object.__float__. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28894.)
aifc.openfp has been deprecated and will be removed in Python 3.9. Use aifc.open instead. (Contributed by Brian Curtin in 31985.)
Support for directly await-ing instances of asyncio.Lock and other asyncio synchronization primitives has been deprecated. An asynchronous context manager must be used in order to acquire and release the synchronization resource. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in 32253.)
The asyncio.Task.current_task and asyncio.Task.all_tasks methods have been deprecated. (Contributed by Andrew Svetlov in 32250.)
In Python 3.8, the abstract base classes in collections.abc will no longer be exposed in the regular collections module. This will help create a clearer distinction between the concrete classes and the abstract base classes. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 25988.)
dbm.dumb now supports reading read-only files and no longer writes the index file when it is not changed. A deprecation warning is now emitted if the index file is missing and recreated in the 'r' and 'w' modes (this will be an error in future Python releases). (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28847.)
In Python 3.8, attempting to check for non-Enum objects in Enum classes will raise a TypeError (e.g. 1 in Color); similarly, attempting to check for non-Flag objects in a Flag member will raise TypeError (e.g. 1 in Perm.RW); currently, both operations return False instead. (Contributed by Ethan Furman in 33217.)
Using non-integer value for selecting a plural form in gettext is now deprecated. It never correctly worked. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 28692.)
Methods MetaPathFinder.find_module() <importlib.abc.MetaPathFinder.find_module> (replaced by MetaPathFinder.find_spec() <importlib.abc.MetaPathFinder.find_spec>) and PathEntryFinder.find_loader() <importlib.abc.PathEntryFinder.find_loader> (replaced by PathEntryFinder.find_spec() <importlib.abc.PathEntryFinder.find_spec>) both deprecated in Python 3.4 now emit DeprecationWarning. (Contributed by Matthias Bussonnier in 29576)
The importlib.abc.ResourceLoader ABC has been deprecated in favour of importlib.abc.ResourceReader.
locale.format has been deprecated, use locale.format_string instead. (Contributed by Garvit in 10379.)
The macpath is now deprecated and will be removed in Python 3.8. (Contributed by Chi Hsuan Yen in 9850.)
dummy_threading and _dummy_thread have been deprecated. It is no longer possible to build Python with threading disabled. Use threading instead. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 31370.)
The silent argument value truncation in socket.htons and socket.ntohs has been deprecated. In future versions of Python, if the passed argument is larger than 16 bits, an exception will be raised. (Contributed by Oren Milman in 28332.)
ssl.wrap_socket is deprecated. Use ssl.SSLContext.wrap_socket instead. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in 28124.)
sunau.openfp has been deprecated and will be removed in Python 3.9. Use sunau.open instead. (Contributed by Brian Curtin in 31985.)
Deprecated sys.set_coroutine_wrapper and sys.get_coroutine_wrapper.
The undocumented sys.callstats() function has been deprecated and will be removed in a future Python version. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in 28799.)
wave.openfp has been deprecated and will be removed in Python 3.9. Use wave.open instead. (Contributed by Brian Curtin in 31985.)
Function :cPySlice_GetIndicesEx is deprecated and replaced with a macro if Py_LIMITED_API is not set or set to a value in the range between 0x03050400 and 0x03060000 (not inclusive), or is 0x03060100 or higher. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 27867.)
:cPyOS_AfterFork has been deprecated. Use :cPyOS_BeforeFork, :cPyOS_AfterFork_Parent or :cPyOS_AfterFork_Child() instead. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in 16500.)
- FreeBSD 9 and older are no longer officially supported.
- For full Unicode support, including within extension modules, *nix platforms are now expected to provide at least one of
C.UTF-8(full locale),C.utf8(full locale) orUTF-8(LC_CTYPE-only locale) as an alternative to the legacyASCII-basedClocale. OpenSSL 0.9.8 and 1.0.1 are no longer supported, which means building CPython 3.7 with SSL/TLS support on older platforms still using these versions requires custom build options that link to a more recent version of OpenSSL.
Notably, this issue affects the Debian 8 (aka "jessie") and Ubuntu 14.04 (aka "Trusty") LTS Linux distributions, as they still use OpenSSL 1.0.1 by default.
Debian 9 ("stretch") and Ubuntu 16.04 ("xenial"), as well as recent releases of other LTS Linux releases (e.g. RHEL/CentOS 7.5, SLES 12-SP3), use OpenSSL 1.0.2 or later, and remain supported in the default build configuration.
CPython's own
CI configuration file <.travis.yml>provides an example of using the SSLcompatibility testing infrastructure <Tools/ssl/multissltests.py>in CPython's test suite to build and link against OpenSSL 1.1.0 rather than an outdated system provided OpenSSL.
The following features and APIs have been removed from Python 3.7:
- The
os.stat_float_times()function has been removed. It was introduced in Python 2.3 for backward compatibility with Python 2.2, and was deprecated since Python 3.1. - Unknown escapes consisting of
'\'and an ASCII letter in replacement templates forre.subwere deprecated in Python 3.5, and will now cause an error. - Removed support of the exclude argument in
tarfile.TarFile.add. It was deprecated in Python 2.7 and 3.2. Use the filter argument instead. - The
splitunc()function in thentpathmodule was deprecated in Python 3.1, and has now been removed. Use the~os.path.splitdrivefunction instead. collections.namedtupleno longer supports the verbose parameter or_sourceattribute which showed the generated source code for the named tuple class. This was part of an optimization designed to speed-up class creation. (Contributed by Jelle Zijlstra with further improvements by INADA Naoki, Serhiy Storchaka, and Raymond Hettinger in28638.)- Functions
bool,float,listandtupleno longer take keyword arguments. The first argument ofintcan now be passed only as positional argument. - Removed previously deprecated in Python 2.4 classes
Plist,Dictand_InternalDictin theplistlibmodule. Dict values in the result of functions~plistlib.readPlistand~plistlib.readPlistFromBytesare now normal dicts. You no longer can use attribute access to access items of these dictionaries. - The
asyncio.windows_utils.socketpair()function has been removed. Use thesocket.socketpairfunction instead, it is available on all platforms since Python 3.5.asyncio.windows_utils.socketpairwas just an alias tosocket.socketpairon Python 3.5 and newer. asynciono longer exports theselectorsand_overlappedmodules asasyncio.selectorsandasyncio._overlapped. Replacefrom asyncio import selectorswithimport selectors.- Direct instantiation of
ssl.SSLSocketandssl.SSLObjectobjects is now prohibited. The constructors were never documented, tested, or designed as public constructors. Users were supposed to usessl.wrap_socketorssl.SSLContext. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in32951.) - The unused
distutilsinstall_misccommand has been removed. (Contributed by Eric N. Vander Weele in29218.)
The fpectl module has been removed. It was never enabled by default, never worked correctly on x86-64, and it changed the Python ABI in ways that caused unexpected breakage of C extensions. (Contributed by Nathaniel J. Smith in 29137.)
The python launcher, (py.exe), can accept 32 & 64 bit specifiers without having to specify a minor version as well. So py -3-32 and py -3-64 become valid as well as py -3.7-32, also the -m-64 and -m.n-64 forms are now accepted to force 64 bit python even if 32 bit would have otherwise been used. If the specified version is not available py.exe will error exit. (Contributed by Steve Barnes in 30291.)
The launcher can be run as py -0 to produce a list of the installed pythons, with default marked with an asterisk. Running py -0p will include the paths. If py is run with a version specifier that cannot be matched it will also print the short form list of available specifiers. (Contributed by Steve Barnes in 30362.)
This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes that may require changes to your code.
asyncandawaitnames are now reserved keywords. Code using these names as identifiers will now raise aSyntaxError. (Contributed by Jelle Zijlstra in30406.)479is enabled for all code in Python 3.7, meaning thatStopIterationexceptions raised directly or indirectly in coroutines and generators are transformed intoRuntimeErrorexceptions. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32670.)object.__aiter__methods can no longer be declared as asynchronous. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in31709.)Due to an oversight, earlier Python versions erroneously accepted the following syntax:
f(1 for x in [1],) class C(1 for x in [1]): passPython 3.7 now correctly raises a
SyntaxError, as a generator expression always needs to be directly inside a set of parentheses and cannot have a comma on either side, and the duplication of the parentheses can be omitted only on calls. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in32012and32023.)- When using the
-mswitch, the initial working directory is now added tosys.path, rather than an empty string (which dynamically denoted the current working directory at the time of each import). Any programs that are checking for the empty string, or otherwise relying on the previous behaviour, will need to be updated accordingly (e.g. by also checking foros.getcwd()oros.path.dirname(__main__.__file__), depending on why the code was checking for the empty string in the first place).
socketserver.ThreadingMixIn.server_closenow waits until all non-daemon threads complete. Set the newsocketserver.ThreadingMixIn.block_on_closeclass attribute toFalseto get the pre-3.7 behaviour. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in31233and33540.)socketserver.ForkingMixIn.server_closenow waits until all child processes complete. Set the newsocketserver.ForkingMixIn.block_on_closeclass attribute toFalseto get the pre-3.7 behaviour. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in31151and33540.)- The
locale.localeconvfunction now temporarily sets theLC_CTYPElocale to the value ofLC_NUMERICin some cases. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in31900.) pkgutil.walk_packagesnow raises aValueErrorif path is a string. Previously an empty list was returned. (Contributed by Sanyam Khurana in24744.)- A format string argument for
string.Formatter.formatis nowpositional-only <positional-only_parameter>. Passing it as a keyword argument was deprecated in Python 3.5. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in29193.) - Attributes
~http.cookies.Morsel.key,~http.cookies.Morsel.valueand~http.cookies.Morsel.coded_valueof classhttp.cookies.Morselare now read-only. Assigning to them was deprecated in Python 3.5. Use the~http.cookies.Morsel.setmethod for setting them. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in29192.) - The mode argument of
os.makedirsno longer affects the file permission bits of newly-created intermediate-level directories. To set their file permission bits you can set the umask before invokingmakedirs(). (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in19930.) - The
struct.Struct.formattype is nowstrinstead ofbytes. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in21071.) ~cgi.parse_multipartnow accepts the encoding and errors arguments and returns the same results as~FieldStorage: for non-file fields, the value associated to a key is a list of strings, not bytes. (Contributed by Pierre Quentel in29979.)- Due to internal changes in
socket, callingsocket.fromshareon a socket created bysocket.share <socket.socket.share>in older Python versions is not supported. reprforBaseExceptionhas changed to not include the trailing comma. Most exceptions are affected by this change. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in30399.)reprfordatetime.timedeltahas changed to include the keyword arguments in the output. (Contributed by Utkarsh Upadhyay in30302.)- Because
shutil.rmtreeis now implemented using theos.scandirfunction, the user specified handler onerror is now called with the first argumentos.scandirinstead ofos.listdirwhen listing the directory is failed. - Support for nested sets and set operations in regular expressions as in Unicode Technical Standard #18 might be added in the future. This would change the syntax. To facilitate this future change a
FutureWarningwill be raised in ambiguous cases for the time being. That include sets starting with a literal'['or containing literal character sequences'--','&&','~~', and'||'. To avoid a warning, escape them with a backslash. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in30349.) The result of splitting a string on a
regular expression <re>that could match an empty string has been changed. For example splitting onr'\s*'will now split not only on whitespaces as it did previously, but also on empty strings before all non-whitespace characters and just before the end of the string. The previous behavior can be restored by changing the pattern tor'\s+'. AFutureWarningwas emitted for such patterns since Python 3.5.For patterns that match both empty and non-empty strings, the result of searching for all matches may also be changed in other cases. For example in the string
'a\n\n', the patternr'(?m)^\s*?$'will not only match empty strings at positions 2 and 3, but also the string'\n'at positions 2--3. To match only blank lines, the pattern should be rewritten asr'(?m)^[^\S\n]*$'.re.sub()now replaces empty matches adjacent to a previous non-empty match. For examplere.sub('x*', '-', 'abxd')returns now'-a-b--d-'instead of'-a-b-d-'(the first minus between 'b' and 'd' replaces 'x', and the second minus replaces an empty string between 'x' and 'd').(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in
25054and32308.)- Change
re.escapeto only escape regex special characters instead of escaping all characters other than ASCII letters, numbers, and'_'. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in29995.) tracemalloc.Tracebackframes are now sorted from oldest to most recent to be more consistent withtraceback. (Contributed by Jesse Bakker in32121.)- On OSes that support
socket.SOCK_NONBLOCKorsocket.SOCK_CLOEXECbit flags, thesocket.type <socket.socket.type>no longer has them applied. Therefore, checks likeif sock.type == socket.SOCK_STREAMwork as expected on all platforms. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32331.) - On Windows the default for the close_fds argument of
subprocess.Popenwas changed fromFalsetoTruewhen redirecting the standard handles. If you previously depended on handles being inherited when usingsubprocess.Popenwith standard io redirection, you will have to passclose_fds=Falseto preserve the previous behaviour, or useSTARTUPINFO.lpAttributeList <subprocess.STARTUPINFO.lpAttributeList>. importlib.machinery.PathFinder.invalidate_caches-- which implicitly affectsimportlib.invalidate_caches-- now deletes entries insys.path_importer_cachewhich are set toNone. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in33169.)- In
asyncio,loop.sock_recv() <asyncio.loop.sock_recv>,loop.sock_sendall() <asyncio.loop.sock_sendall>,loop.sock_accept() <asyncio.loop.sock_accept>,loop.getaddrinfo() <asyncio.loop.getaddrinfo>,loop.getnameinfo() <asyncio.loop.getnameinfo>have been changed to be proper coroutine methods to match their documentation. Previously, these methods returnedasyncio.Futureinstances. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32327.) asyncio.Server.socketsnow returns a copy of the internal list of server sockets, instead of returning it directly. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in32662.)Struct.format <struct.Struct.format>is now astrinstance instead of abytesinstance. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in21071.)argparsesubparsers can now be made mandatory by passingrequired=TruetoArgumentParser.add_subparsers() <argparse.ArgumentParser.add_subparsers>. (Contributed by Anthony Sottile in26510.)ast.literal_eval()is now stricter. Addition and subtraction of arbitrary numbers are no longer allowed. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in31778.)Calendar.itermonthdates <calendar.Calendar.itermonthdates>will now consistently raise an exception when a date falls outside of the0001-01-01through9999-12-31range. To support applications that cannot tolerate such exceptions, the newCalendar.itermonthdays3 <calendar.Calendar.itermonthdays3>andCalendar.itermonthdays4 <calendar.Calendar.itermonthdays4>can be used. The new methods return tuples and are not restricted by the range supported bydatetime.date. (Contributed by Alexander Belopolsky in28292.)collections.ChainMapnow preserves the order of the underlying mappings. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in32792.)- The
submit()method ofconcurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutorandconcurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutornow raises aRuntimeErrorif called during interpreter shutdown. (Contributed by Mark Nemec in33097.) - The
configparser.ConfigParserconstructor now usesread_dict()to process the default values, making its behavior consistent with the rest of the parser. Non-string keys and values in the defaults dictionary are now being implicitly converted to strings. (Contributed by James Tocknell in23835.) - Several undocumented internal imports were removed. One example is that
os.errnois no longer available; useimport errnodirectly instead. Note that such undocumented internal imports may be removed any time without notice, even in micro version releases.
The function :cPySlice_GetIndicesEx is considered unsafe for resizable sequences. If the slice indices are not instances of int, but objects that implement the !__index__ method, the sequence can be resized after passing its length to :c!PySlice_GetIndicesEx. This can lead to returning indices out of the length of the sequence. For avoiding possible problems use new functions :cPySlice_Unpack and :cPySlice_AdjustIndices. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in 27867.)
There are two new opcodes: LOAD_METHOD and CALL_METHOD. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov and INADA Naoki in 26110.)
The STORE_ANNOTATION opcode has been removed. (Contributed by Mark Shannon in 32550.)
The file used to override sys.path is now called <python-executable>._pth instead of 'sys.path'. See finding_modules for more information. (Contributed by Steve Dower in 28137.)
In preparation for potential future changes to the public CPython runtime initialization API (see 432 for an initial, but somewhat outdated, draft), CPython's internal startup and configuration management logic has been significantly refactored. While these updates are intended to be entirely transparent to both embedding applications and users of the regular CPython CLI, they're being mentioned here as the refactoring changes the internal order of various operations during interpreter startup, and hence may uncover previously latent defects, either in embedding applications, or in CPython itself. (Initially contributed by Nick Coghlan and Eric Snow as part of 22257, and further updated by Nick, Eric, and Victor Stinner in a number of other issues). Some known details affected:
- :c
PySys_AddWarnOptionUnicodeis not currently usable by embedding applications due to the requirement to create a Unicode object prior to calling Py_Initialize. Use :cPySys_AddWarnOptioninstead. - warnings filters added by an embedding application with :c
PySys_AddWarnOptionshould now more consistently take precedence over the default filters set by the interpreter
Due to changes in the way the default warnings filters are configured, setting :cPy_BytesWarningFlag to a value greater than one is no longer sufficient to both emit BytesWarning messages and have them converted to exceptions. Instead, the flag must be set (to cause the warnings to be emitted in the first place), and an explicit error::BytesWarning warnings filter added to convert them to exceptions.
Due to a change in the way docstrings are handled by the compiler, the implicit return None in a function body consisting solely of a docstring is now marked as occurring on the same line as the docstring, not on the function's header line.
The current exception state has been moved from the frame object to the co-routine. This simplified the interpreter and fixed a couple of obscure bugs caused by having swap exception state when entering or exiting a generator. (Contributed by Mark Shannon in 25612.)
Starting in 3.7.1, :cPy_Initialize now consistently reads and respects all of the same environment settings as :cPy_Main (in earlier Python versions, it respected an ill-defined subset of those environment variables, while in Python 3.7.0 it didn't read any of them due to 34247). If this behavior is unwanted, set :cPy_IgnoreEnvironmentFlag to 1 before calling :cPy_Initialize.
In 3.7.1 the C API for Context Variables was updated <contextvarsobjects_pointertype_change> to use :cPyObject pointers. See also 34762.
In 3.7.1 the tokenize module now implicitly emits a NEWLINE token when provided with input that does not have a trailing new line. This behavior now matches what the C tokenizer does internally. (Contributed by Ammar Askar in 33899.)
In 3.7.2, venv on Windows no longer copies the original binaries, but creates redirector scripts named python.exe and pythonw.exe instead. This resolves a long standing issue where all virtual environments would have to be upgraded or recreated with each Python update. However, note that this release will still require recreation of virtual environments in order to get the new scripts.
Due to significant security concerns, the reuse_address parameter of asyncio.loop.create_datagram_endpoint is no longer supported. This is because of the behavior of the socket option SO_REUSEADDR in UDP. For more details, see the documentation for loop.create_datagram_endpoint(). (Contributed by Kyle Stanley, Antoine Pitrou, and Yury Selivanov in 37228.)