**************************** What's New In Python 3.8 **************************** .. Rules for maintenance: * Anyone can add text to this document. Do not spend very much time on the wording of your changes, because your text will probably get rewritten to some degree. * The maintainer will go through Misc/NEWS periodically and add changes; it's therefore more important to add your changes to Misc/NEWS than to this file. * This is not a complete list of every single change; completeness is the purpose of Misc/NEWS. Some changes I consider too small or esoteric to include. If such a change is added to the text, I'll just remove it. (This is another reason you shouldn't spend too much time on writing your addition.) * If you want to draw your new text to the attention of the maintainer, add 'XXX' to the beginning of the paragraph or section. * It's OK to just add a fragmentary note about a change. For example: "XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket module." The maintainer will research the change and write the necessary text. * You can comment out your additions if you like, but it's not necessary (especially when a final release is some months away). * Credit the author of a patch or bugfix. Just the name is sufficient; the e-mail address isn't necessary. * It's helpful to add the bug/patch number as a comment: XXX Describe the transmogrify() function added to the socket module. (Contributed by P.Y. Developer in :issue:`12345`.) This saves the maintainer the effort of going through the Mercurial log when researching a change. This article explains the new features in Python 3.8, compared to 3.7. For full details, see the :ref:`changelog `. .. note:: Prerelease users should be aware that this document is currently in draft form. It will be updated substantially as Python 3.8 moves towards release, so it's worth checking back even after reading earlier versions. Summary -- Release highlights ============================= .. This section singles out the most important changes in Python 3.8. Brevity is key. .. PEP-sized items next. New Features ============ Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode files ----------------------------------------------------- The new :envvar:`PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX` setting (also available as :option:`-X` ``pycache_prefix``) configures the implicit bytecode cache to use a separate parallel filesystem tree, rather than the default ``__pycache__`` subdirectories within each source directory. The location of the cache is reported in :data:`sys.pycache_prefix` (:const:`None` indicates the default location in ``__pycache__`` subdirectories). (Contributed by Carl Meyer in :issue:`33499`.) Other Language Changes ====================== * A :keyword:`continue` statement was illegal in the :keyword:`finally` clause due to a problem with the implementation. In Python 3.8 this restriction was lifted. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`32489`.) * The :class:`int` type now has a new :meth:`~int.as_integer_ratio` method compatible with the existing :meth:`float.as_integer_ratio` method. (Contributed by Lisa Roach in :issue:`33073`.) * Added support of ``\N{name}`` escapes in :mod:`regular expressions `. (Contributed by Jonathan Eunice and Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`30688`.) * The syntax allowed for keyword names in function calls was further restricted. In particular, ``f((keyword)=arg)`` is no longer allowed. It was never intended to permit more than a bare name on the left-hand side of a keyword argument assignment term. See :issue:`34641`. * Iterable unpacking is now allowed without parentheses in :keyword:`yield` and :keyword:`return` statements. (Contributed by David Cuthbert and Jordan Chapman in :issue:`32117`.) * A backslash-character pair that is not a valid escape sequence generates a :exc:`DeprecationWarning` since Python 3.6. In Python 3.8 it generates a :exc:`SyntaxWarning` instead. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`32912`.) New Modules =========== * None yet. Improved Modules ================ asyncio ------- On Windows, the default event loop is now :class:`~asyncio.ProactorEventLoop`. idlelib and IDLE ---------------- Output over N lines (50 by default) is squeezed down to a button. N can be changed in the PyShell section of the General page of the Settings dialog. Fewer, but possibly extra long, lines can be squeezed by right clicking on the output. Squeezed output can be expanded in place by double-clicking the button or into the clipboard or a separate window by right-clicking the button. (Contributed by Tal Einat in :issue:`1529353`.) The changes above have been backported to 3.7 maintenance releases. os.path ------- :mod:`os.path` functions that return a boolean result like :func:`~os.path.exists`, :func:`~os.path.lexists`, :func:`~os.path.isdir`, :func:`~os.path.isfile`, :func:`~os.path.islink`, and :func:`~os.path.ismount` now return ``False`` instead of raising :exc:`ValueError` or its subclasses :exc:`UnicodeEncodeError` and :exc:`UnicodeDecodeError` for paths that contain characters or bytes unrepresentable at the OS level. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`33721`.) ncurses ------- Added a new variable holding structured version information for the underlying ncurses library: :data:`~curses.ncurses_version`. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`31680`.) pathlib ------- :mod:`pathlib.Path` methods that return a boolean result like :meth:`~pathlib.Path.exists()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_dir()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_file()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_mount()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_symlink()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_block_device()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_char_device()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_fifo()`, :meth:`~pathlib.Path.is_socket()` now return ``False`` instead of raising :exc:`ValueError` or its subclass :exc:`UnicodeEncodeError` for paths that contain characters unrepresentable at the OS level. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`33721`.) ssl --- Added :attr:`SSLContext.post_handshake_auth` to enable and :meth:`ssl.SSLSocket.verify_client_post_handshake` to initiate TLS 1.3 post-handshake authentication. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in :issue:`34670`.) tokenize -------- The :mod:`tokenize` module now implicitly emits a ``NEWLINE`` token when provided with input that does not have a trailing new line. This behavior now matches what the C tokenizer does internally. (Contributed by Ammar Askar in :issue:`33899`.) tkinter ------- Added methods :meth:`~tkinter.Spinbox.selection_from`, :meth:`~tkinter.Spinbox.selection_present`, :meth:`~tkinter.Spinbox.selection_range` and :meth:`~tkinter.Spinbox.selection_to` in the :class:`tkinter.Spinbox` class. (Contributed by Juliette Monsel in :issue:`34829`.) Added method :meth:`~tkinter.Canvas.moveto` in the :class:`tkinter.Canvas` class. (Contributed by Juliette Monsel in :issue:`23831`.) venv ---- * :mod:`venv` now includes an ``Activate.ps1`` script on all platforms for activating virtual environments under PowerShell Core 6.1. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in :issue:`32718`.) xml --- * As mitigation against DTD and external entity retrieval, the :mod:`xml.dom.minidom` and mod:`xml.sax` modules no longer process external entities by default. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in :issue:`17239`.) Optimizations ============= * :func:`shutil.copyfile`, :func:`shutil.copy`, :func:`shutil.copy2`, :func:`shutil.copytree` and :func:`shutil.move` use platform-specific "fast-copy" syscalls on Linux, macOS and Solaris in order to copy the file more efficiently. "fast-copy" means that the copying operation occurs within the kernel, avoiding the use of userspace buffers in Python as in "``outfd.write(infd.read())``". On Windows :func:`shutil.copyfile` uses a bigger default buffer size (1 MiB instead of 16 KiB) and a :func:`memoryview`-based variant of :func:`shutil.copyfileobj` is used. The speedup for copying a 512 MiB file within the same partition is about +26% on Linux, +50% on macOS and +40% on Windows. Also, much less CPU cycles are consumed. See :ref:`shutil-platform-dependent-efficient-copy-operations` section. (Contributed by Giampaolo Rodola' in :issue:`25427`.) * The default protocol in the :mod:`pickle` module is now Protocol 4, first introduced in Python 3.4. It offers better performance and smaller size compared to Protocol 3 available since Python 3.0. * Removed one ``Py_ssize_t`` member from ``PyGC_Head``. All GC tracked objects (e.g. tuple, list, dict) size is reduced 4 or 8 bytes. (Contributed by Inada Naoki in :issue:`33597`) * :class:`uuid.UUID` now uses ``__slots__`` to reduce its memory footprint. Note that this means that instances can no longer be weak-referenced and that arbitrary attributes can no longer be added to them. * The :class:`list` constructor does not overallocate the internal item buffer if the input iterable has a known length (the input implements ``__len__``). This makes the created list 12% smaller on average. (Contributed by Pablo Galindo in :issue:`33234`.) Build and C API Changes ======================= * The result of :c:func:`PyExceptionClass_Name` is now of type ``const char *`` rather of ``char *``. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`33818`.) * The duality of ``Modules/Setup.dist`` and ``Modules/Setup`` has been removed. Previously, when updating the CPython source tree, one had to manually copy ``Modules/Setup.dist`` (inside the source tree) to ``Modules/Setup`` (inside the build tree) in order to reflect any changes upstream. This was of a small benefit to packagers at the expense of a frequent annoyance to developers following CPython development, as forgetting to copy the file could produce build failures. Now the build system always reads from ``Modules/Setup`` inside the source tree. People who want to customize that file are encouraged to maintain their changes in a git fork of CPython or as patch files, as they would do for any other change to the source tree. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou in :issue:`32430`.) Deprecated ========== * Deprecated methods ``getchildren()`` and ``getiterator()`` in the :mod:`~xml.etree.ElementTree` module emit now a :exc:`DeprecationWarning` instead of :exc:`PendingDeprecationWarning`. They will be removed in Python 3.9. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`29209`.) * Passing an object that is not an instance of :class:`concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor` to :meth:`asyncio.loop.set_default_executor()` is deprecated and will be prohibited in Python 3.9. (Contributed by Elvis Pranskevichus in :issue:`34075`.) * The :meth:`__getitem__` methods of :class:`xml.dom.pulldom.DOMEventStream`, :class:`wsgiref.util.FileWrapper` and :class:`fileinput.FileInput` have been deprecated. Implementations of these methods have been ignoring their *index* parameter, and returning the next item instead. (Contributed by Berker Peksag in :issue:`9372`.) * :mod:`ast` classes ``Num``, ``Str``, ``Bytes``, ``NameConstant`` and ``Ellipsis`` are considered deprecated and will be removed in future Python versions. :class:`~ast.Constant` should be used instead. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`32892`.) * The following functions and methods are deprecated in the :mod:`gettext` module: :func:`~gettext.lgettext`, :func:`~gettext.ldgettext`, :func:`~gettext.lngettext` and :func:`~gettext.ldngettext`. They return encoded bytes, and it's possible that you will get unexpected Unicode-related exceptions if there are encoding problems with the translated strings. It's much better to use alternatives which return Unicode strings in Python 3. These functions have been broken for a long time. Function :func:`~gettext.bind_textdomain_codeset`, methods :meth:`~gettext.NullTranslations.output_charset` and :meth:`~gettext.NullTranslations.set_output_charset`, and the *codeset* parameter of functions :func:`~gettext.translation` and :func:`~gettext.install` are also deprecated, since they are only used for for the ``l*gettext()`` functions. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`33710`.) Removed ======= * The ``pyvenv`` script has been removed in favor of ``python3.8 -m venv`` to help eliminate confusion as to what Python interpreter the ``pyvenv`` script is tied to. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in :issue:`25427`.) * ``parse_qs``, ``parse_qsl``, and ``escape`` are removed from :mod:`cgi` module. They are deprecated from Python 3.2 or older. * ``filemode`` function is removed from :mod:`tarfile` module. It is not documented and deprecated since Python 3.3. * The :class:`~xml.etree.ElementTree.XMLParser` constructor no longer accepts the *html* argument. It never had effect and was deprecated in Python 3.4. All other parameters are now :ref:`keyword-only `. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`29209`.) * Removed the ``doctype()`` method of :class:`~xml.etree.ElementTree.XMLParser`. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`29209`.) Porting to Python 3.8 ===================== This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes that may require changes to your code. Changes in Python behavior -------------------------- * Yield expressions (both ``yield`` and ``yield from`` clauses) are now disallowed in comprehensions and generator expressions (aside from the iterable expression in the leftmost :keyword:`for` clause). (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`10544`.) Changes in the Python API ------------------------- * The :meth:`~tkinter.ttk.Treeview.selection` method of the :class:`tkinter.ttk.Treeview` class no longer takes arguments. Using it with arguments for changing the selection was deprecated in Python 3.6. Use specialized methods like :meth:`~tkinter.ttk.Treeview.selection_set` for changing the selection. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`31508`.) * A :mod:`dbm.dumb` database opened with flags ``'r'`` is now read-only. :func:`dbm.dumb.open` with flags ``'r'`` and ``'w'`` no longer creates a database if it does not exist. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`32749`.) * The ``doctype()`` method defined in a subclass of :class:`~xml.etree.ElementTree.XMLParser` will no longer be called and will cause emitting a :exc:`RuntimeWarning` instead of a :exc:`DeprecationWarning`. Define the :meth:`doctype() ` method on a target for handling an XML doctype declaration. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`29209`.) * A :exc:`RuntimeError` is now raised when the custom metaclass doesn't provide the ``__classcell__`` entry in the namespace passed to ``type.__new__``. A :exc:`DeprecationWarning` was emitted in Python 3.6--3.7. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`23722`.) * The :class:`cProfile.Profile` class can now be used as a context manager. (Contributed by Scott Sanderson in :issue:`29235`.) * :func:`shutil.copyfile`, :func:`shutil.copy`, :func:`shutil.copy2`, :func:`shutil.copytree` and :func:`shutil.move` use platform-specific "fast-copy" syscalls (see :ref:`shutil-platform-dependent-efficient-copy-operations` section). * :func:`shutil.copyfile` default buffer size on Windows was changed from 16 KiB to 1 MiB. * ``PyGC_Head`` struct is changed completely. All code touched the struct member should be rewritten. (See :issue:`33597`) * Asyncio tasks can now be named, either by passing the ``name`` keyword argument to :func:`asyncio.create_task` or the :meth:`~asyncio.loop.create_task` event loop method, or by calling the :meth:`~asyncio.Task.set_name` method on the task object. The task name is visible in the ``repr()`` output of :class:`asyncio.Task` and can also be retrieved using the :meth:`~asyncio.Task.get_name` method. * The :meth:`mmap.flush() ` method now returns ``None`` on success and raises an exception on error under all platforms. Previously, its behavior was platform-depended: a nonzero value was returned on success; zero was returned on error under Windows. A zero value was returned on success; an exception was raised on error under Unix. (Contributed by Berker Peksag in :issue:`2122`.) * The function :func:`math.factorial` no longer accepts arguments that are not int-like. (Contributed by Pablo Galindo in :issue:`33083`.) * :class:`uuid.UUID` now uses ``__slots__``, therefore instances can no longer be weak-referenced and attributes can no longer be added. * :mod:`xml.dom.minidom` and mod:`xml.sax` modules no longer process external entities by default. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in :issue:`17239`.) CPython bytecode changes ------------------------ * The interpreter loop has been simplified by moving the logic of unrolling the stack of blocks into the compiler. The compiler emits now explicit instructions for adjusting the stack of values and calling the cleaning-up code for :keyword:`break`, :keyword:`continue` and :keyword:`return`. Removed opcodes :opcode:`BREAK_LOOP`, :opcode:`CONTINUE_LOOP`, :opcode:`SETUP_LOOP` and :opcode:`SETUP_EXCEPT`. Added new opcodes :opcode:`ROT_FOUR`, :opcode:`BEGIN_FINALLY`, :opcode:`CALL_FINALLY` and :opcode:`POP_FINALLY`. Changed the behavior of :opcode:`END_FINALLY` and :opcode:`WITH_CLEANUP_START`. (Contributed by Mark Shannon, Antoine Pitrou and Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`17611`.) * Added new opcode :opcode:`END_ASYNC_FOR` for handling exceptions raised when awaiting a next item in an :keyword:`async for` loop. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in :issue:`33041`.)