python

Python 3.12’s beta’s are out, which means the features are locked in. The theme this year has been cleanup and typing. distutils has been removed, and setuptools is no longer present in default environments.

cibuildwheel 2.10 is out, with some important additions. PEP 517 config settings added, --only (which has an interesting use in GHA), and Cirrus CI support (including our first Apple Silicon native runner!) are highlights. We also support Python 3.11 now (as of 2.11.2, RC’s in older releases).

We’ve had some fantastic releases of cibuildwheel this year, including some very powerful features you might be interested in using, and I haven’t covered releases since 2.2, so let’s take an in-depth look at what’s new for this and the last few releases!

Python 3.10 is out (and has been for a while, I’m late posting this), with new features and changes. The big new language feature this update is pattern matching. We get much better errors, the always-present typing improvements, and finally some real usage of the new PEG parser from 3.9.

Python 3.11 has hit the beta (now released!) stage, which means no more new features. It’s a perfect time to play with it! The themes in this update are the standard ones: The faster CPython project is now fully going (3.11 is 25% faster on average), along with improved error messages, typing, and asyncio. Beyond this, the only major new feature is a library for reading TOML files; this probably only exciting if you are involved in Python packaging (but I am, so I’m excited!).

Python 3.7 has been out for a while. In fact, it’s the oldest version of Python still receiving support when this was written. I’d still like to write a “what’s new”, targeting users who are upgrading to a Python 3.7+ only codebase, and want to know what to take advantage of!

Poetry provides a all in one solution to Python packaging. I want to focus on why I was quite hard on Poetry in my last post, specifically on its default version capping and solver quirks, and also a few other negative things. This is a followup to Should you have upper version bounds, which you should read before this post.