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Another great release from cibuildwheel, 2.2.0, is out! There are a few important additions in this release that you should be aware of, so I will outline the major changes here. We will cover the new musllinux wheels, overload configuration, and incoming changes to pip and PyPy expected in the next release. As always, it is recommended that you pin your cibuildwheel version and then provide some automated way to keep the pin up-to-date, such as GitHub’s dependabot. You should be updating just before you make a release, as well, but you probably don’t want to be surprised by new wheels during your release process!

The cibuildwheel package has just had a major release with some fantastic features. Python 2.7 and 3.5 support has been removed (and PyPy3.6), allowing us to update to the latest manylinux and auditwheel versions, and support the newly unified manylinux PyPy3.7 images. We now allow users to select pypa/build as a build frontend. We now have a custom option to enable pre-release Pythons (3.10 currently) for testing before they are ABI stable (please don’t release wheels until that happens). Maybe most exciting, cibuildwheel now supports configuration in pyproject.toml, allowing you to be even further isolated from dependence on your CI system; you can easily produce Linux and Windows wheels locally (macOS still installs to system locations). And, since my last post and introduction post, cibuildwheel is now part of the PyPA!

CLI11, a powerful library for writing beautiful command line interfaces in C++11, has been updated to 2.0. A lot of deprecated things have been removed, and there was a lot of cleanup under-the-hood; making CLI11 simpler. A few defaults have changed slightly, like better TOML support by default.

CLI11 does a better job than ever understanding any sort of container you provide - complex numbers are natively supported, along with atomic types. A long requested feature, simple version flags, has been added. Subcommands are more customizable. And there have been quite a few bugfixes for rare issues.

Python 3.9 is out (and has been for a while, I’m late posting this), with new features and changes. The themes for this release have been heavily internal improvements, such as a new more powerful parser, and the usual static typing improvements, along with a several bits new-user facing new syntax. This makes 3.9 a smaller release, but still it has some nice features of note.

I recently got an M1 mac, and I’ll be cataloging my experience with using it for scientific software development. I’ll be returning to update this page periodically, and will eventually have a focused recommendation for Apple Silicon setup, similar to my Intel setup.

cibuildwheel has just had two back-to-back releases, two weeks apart, representing several months of hard work and a few exciting features! I will be covering both releases at once, so we will discuss Apple Silicon support, architecture emulation on Linux, integrated PEP 621 Requires-Python support, the native GitHub Action, extended build and test controls, and more!

If you are following the releases, 1.7.0 came out last November (2020), and included the fantastic output folding feature, which makes logs much easier to read on CI systems that support folding, and makes it much easier to see how long each step takes. The 1.7.x series also included the addition of the working examples section of the documentation, which tracks some known projects using cibuildwheel, such as scikit-learn, Matplotlib, and MyPy; it is a great place to go to look into how other projects have integrated cibuildwheel into their workflow.

I have a general overview post as well. Now let’s look at what’s new! Update: cibuildwheel is now an official package of the PyPA!

This is the first of two posts on cibuildwheel, a fantastic project I joined after switching to it from my own azure-wheel-helpers, which I’ve blogged about here before. It is the best wheelbuilding system available for Python today, and can make something that is normally a pain to setup and a headache to maintain a breeze (by forcing all the headaches on us, of course, as maintainers, but it’s better to solve issues centrally! Obviously we rather like solving these problems. Or we are just crazy, which is also possible ;) ).

Be sure to checkout the followup post over new features in 1.8.0 and 1.9.0, too! Also, cibuildwheel was recently accepted into the PyPA!

I am pleased to announce the release of pybind11 2.6.0! This is the largest release since 2.2 (released over three years ago). I would like to highlight some of the key changes below; be sure to check out the changelog and upgrade guide for more information! The focus of this release was stability, packaging, and supporting more platforms, though there are a lot of small features and useful additions, covered by newly expanded docs.