Programming

Python π (3.14) beta 1 is out, which means the features are locked in. The big feature this time around are template strings, lots more color (including syntax highlighting in the REPL!), remote debugging, deferred evaluation of annotations, and the usual error message and performance improvements.

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.

C++23 is complete and pretty much finalized, so let’s explore the new features in C++, from a data science point of view. This is not as large of a release as C++20 or C++11, but it’s still a hefty release with lots of nice new features - larger than C++17.

Some of the major new features are building on themes from C++20, such as vastly expanded ranges and views, more constexpr/consteval, module support for the standard library, std::print to supplement std::format, and a std::generator to support coroutines. There are also several general features, lambdas and classes get along much better now, there are new preprocessor additions (!), a stacktrace library, flat maps/sets, and new std::optional monadics, deducing this, and many various additions.