python

Scikit-build-core 0.10 is out, and it is one of the largest releases we’ve produced in terms of new configuration options. It automatically reads your minimum CMake version, you can tell it to read your scikit-build-core minimum-version, and there are settings for many of the advanced things users used to do with scikit-build (classic), like rebuilds or pure Python fallbacks on build failures.

cibuildwheel 2.19 is out, with some very big additions. A new platform, Pyodide, has been added for building WebAssembly wheels. We’ve added CPython 3.13 free-threaded builds, now on all OS’s. And we have an opt-in speed improvement with the build[uv] build-frontend option.

We’ve had some fantastic releases of cibuildwheel since my last post over 2.10, so I’ll include a few of the new features from those releases, too, with a highlight on a larger feature that can use more explaining: inherit for overrides.

Python 3.13 betas are out (Edit: 3.13.0 is out!), which means the features are locked in. For the first time in thirty years, Python has a new, more colorful REPL! There’s also a no-GIL compile-time option (free-threaded), an optional JIT, some new typing features, and better error messages (again).

While it can also do much more, Python is a fantastic language for writing small scripts and utilities with it’s expressive syntax and batteries-included standard library. But what if you need just a bit more? PyPI is one of the best package repositories for any language, and being able to access it without having to write a multi-file library and setting up virtual environments would be a dream - one that is becoming reality. Pipx 1.4.2 has an experimental implementation of the provisionally accepted PEP 723, and I’d like to show it off here, as it’s tremendously useful for simple scripts & utilities. Support is also available in Nox 2024.04.15 and Hatch 1.10.

One outcome of the 2023 Scientific Python Developer Summit was the Scientific Python Development Guide, a comprehensive guide to modern Python package development, complete with a new project template supporting 12 build backends and a WebAssembly-powered checker with checks linked to the guide. The guide covers topics like modern, compiled, and classic packaging, style checks, type checking, docs, task runners, CI, tests, and much more! There also are sections of tutorials, principles, and some common patterns.

This guide (along with cookie & repo-review) started in Scikit-HEP in 2020. During the summit, it was merged with the NSLS-II guidelines, which provided the basis for the principles section. I’d like to thank and acknowledge Dan Allan and Gregory Lee for working tirelessly during the summit to rework, rewrite, merge, and fix the guide, including writing most of the tutorials pages and first patterns page, and rewriting the environment page as a tutorial.

I’ve released a new¹ toolkit for running checks, similar to Ruff and Flake8 but designed to check configuration, called repo-review. It requires Python 3.10+² to run and has no built-in checks, but is easy to write plugins for. A set of checks based on the Scientific Python Development Guide (which I also have a post about!) are available as a plugin, sp-repo-review. You can run repo-review in WebAssembly (via Pyodide), or in pre-commit, or as a GitHub Action. It supports multiple output formats, including Rich, HTML, and JSON. The system is based on fixtures (like pytest) and topologically sorts requirements. You don’t need to depend on repo-review to add a repo-review plugin. You can see a live version using sp-repo-review in-place here or standalone here.