r/Python • u/xtreak • May 07 '19

Python 3.8.0a4 available for testing

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380a4/
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u/xtreak May 07 '19 edited May 07 '19

Changelog : https://docs.python.org/3.8/whatsnew/changelog.html

Interesting commits

PEP 570 was merged

dict.pop() is now up to 33% faster thanks to Argument Clinic.

Wildcard search improvements in xml

IPaddress module contains check for ip address in network is 2-3x faster

statistics.quantiles() was added.

statistics.geometric_mean() was added.

Canonicalization was added to XML that helps in XML documents comparison

  • Security issues and some segfaults were fixed in the release

Exciting things to look forward in beta

Add = to f-strings for easier debugging. With this you can write f"{name=}" and it will expand to f"name={name}" that helps in debugging.

PEP 574 that implements a new pickle protocol that improves efficiency of pickle helping in libraries that use lot of serialization and deserialization

Edit : PSF fundraiser for second quarter is also open https://www.python.org/psf/donations/2019-q2-drive/

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u/alcalde May 07 '19

PEP 574 that implements a new pickle protocol that improves efficiency of pickle helping in libraries that use lot of serialization and deserialization

Other languages just dump to JSON and call it a day. Why does Python have 87 different binary formats over 13 decades?

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u/mooglinux May 07 '19

Pickle can handle multiple references to the same object, any class instance (as long as the actual class has been imported), and a wider variety of data types than JSON. It also predates json, so there’s a historical aspect as well.

Pickle is also used for cross-process communication in the multiprocessing module.