Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule forPython 3.8. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sizeditems.

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 forapproximately 18 months. Some time after the release of 3.9.0 final,the ninth and final 3.8 bugfix update was released. After that,security updates (source only) were released for 5 years until therelease of Python 3.13.0 final.

As of 2024-10-07, 3.8 has reached theend-of-life phaseof its release cycle. 3.8.20 was the final security release.The codebase for 3.8 is now frozen and no further updates will beprovided nor issues of any kind will be accepted on the bug tracker.

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),andPEP 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 infinally: blocks
• on Windows, the defaultasyncio event loop is nowProactorEventLoop
• on macOS, thespawn start method is now used by default inmultiprocessing
• multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoidpickling 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.