Python Software Foundation
New release of the Python Language
Python 3.13.0 is now available. This is the stable release of Python 3.13.0.
Python 3.13.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations compared to Python 3.12. (Compared to the last release candidate, 3.13.0rc3, 3.13.0 contains two small bug fixes and some documentation and testing changes.)
Major new features of the 3.13 series, compared to 3.12
Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.13 are:
- A new and improved interactive interpreter, based on PyPy, featuring multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks
- An experimental free-threaded build mode, which disables the Global Interpreter Lock, allowing threads to run more concurrently. The build mode is available as an experimental feature in the Windows and macOS installers as well.
- A preliminary, experimental JIT provides the groundwork for significant performance improvements.
- The locals() builtin function (and its C equivalent) now has well-defined semantics when mutating the returned mapping, which allows debuggers to operate more consistently.
- A modified version of mimalloc is now included, optional but enabled by default if supported by the platform and required for the free-threaded build mode.
- Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files. (Most tools handling docstrings already strip leading indentation.)
- The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
- The minimum supported macOS version was changed from 10.9 to 10.13 (High Sierra). Older macOS versions will not be supported going forward.
- WASI is now a Tier 2 supported platform. Emscripten is no longer an officially supported platform (but Pyodide continues to support Emscripten).
- iOS is now a Tier 3 supported platform.
- Android is now a Tier 3 supported platform.
- Support for type defaults in type parameters.
- A new type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
- A new annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
- A new annotation for marking deprecations in the type system.
- PEP 594 (Removing dead batteries from the standard library)
scheduled removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.
- Many other removals of deprecated classes, functions and methods in various standard library modules.
- C API removals and deprecations: Some removals present in alpha 1 were reverted in alpha 2, as the removals were deemed too disruptive at this time.
- New deprecations, most of which are scheduled for removal from Python 3.15 or 3.16.
For more details on the changes to Python 3.13, see What’s new in Python 3.13.
- Online Documentation
- PEP 719, 3.13 Release Schedule
- Report bugs at Issues · python/cpython · GitHub.
- Help fund Python directly or via GitHub Sponsors, and support the Python community.
We hope you enjoy the new releases!
Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.
Sponsored Projects
Welcome to our newest Sponsored Project: Dynare
Dynare is an open source software platform offering computational tools to handle a wide range of economic models. With its intuitive interface and well-documented features, Dynare simplifies the process of describing economic models and provides academic, professional, and student social scientists with reliable routines to solve, simulate, and estimate them.
PyBaMM
Here are some updates from PyBaMM:
- New release: v24.9 (Release notes: PyBaMM — PyBaMM 24.9 has been released!)
The PyBaMM job board is now live (PyBaMM — PyBaMM Jobs Board), where organizations can advertise their battery modeling positions (in exchange for a small fee that will help fund PyBaMM). Thanks to Nolan for assisting us in setting up the payment portal!
rOpenSci
Recent release:
Community call recording: Navigating the R ecosystem using R-universe (Video and resources). Learn more about R-Universe and how you can use it to improve your R package development workflow. In this community call, Jeroen Ooms provided details on what R-Universe is and an update on what you can do with it today. He also discussed the future of R-Universe and how it can be used to navigate the R ecosystem.
R-Universe list pages
R-Universe now features a list of all datasets in all packages and a list of all vignettes from CRAN, Bioconductor, and others.
Another important global table is the package scoreboard that lets you explore the scores used by R-Universe search engine for ranking, which is based on:
- Stars: Number of stars on GitHub;
- Downloads per month from CRAN or Bioconductor mirrors;
- Scripts: (NEW) number of files on GitHub that mention ’library(pkgname)’;
- Dependents: recursive reverse dependencies;
- Unique contributors;
- Yearly commits
Resources from rOpenSci training sessions
We’ve added a searchable table of past training sessions to our resources hosted on the rOpenSci website. Explore the full list of our resources.
Materials: Screen Reader Accessible Tools and Resources for Learning and Working with R
- We have now published the recording of the webinar that walks through learning and using R with screen readers—and it’s bilingual (English and Turkish)! with subtitles in English.
- Webinar video featuring Liz Hare, PhD, and Alican Cagri Gokcek
- Also, Liz Hare’s detailed technical note with all the necessary resources to get started is worth reading.
Upcoming events
Social Coworking and Office Hours — Getting to know Openscapes: Tuesday, 05 November 2024 09:00 PST • online
A comunidade R fala português (Community Call): Wednesday, 06 November 2024 05:00 PST (online) | The first rOpenSci Community Call in Portuguese!!
rOpenSci Translathon at LatinR | Latinamerican Conference About the Use of R in R&D 2024: Monday, 18 November 2024 00:00 PST • online + Will Landau is a keynote speaker at the conference.
BioNT Community Event & CarpentryConnect-Heidelberg 2024: Tuesday, 12 November 2024 00:00 PST • Heidelberg Germany — Yani Bellini Saibene is a keynote speaker
Calls for participation
Calls for maintainers
If you’re interested in maintaining any of the R packages below, you might enjoy our blog post "What Does It Mean to Maintain a Package?"
- medrxivr, access and search MedRxiv and BioRxiv preprint data. Issue for volunteering.
- USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America . Issue for volunteering.
- historydata, datasets for historians. Issue for volunteering.
Calls for contributions
- Help make qualtRics better! Code contributions wanted
- Help make assertr better! Come close issues
- Help users and developers of targets by answering questions!
- Help make waywiser better! User requests wanted
Also refer to our help wanted page — before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.
Holoviz
Please find below the news from the HoloViz project.
We have released Panel 1.5! Check out the announcement blog post to find out more about these new features:
- Easily create new components: It is now trivially easy to build new JavaScript, React, or AnyWidget-based components with hot-reload, built-in compilation, and bundling. Likewise for Python based widgets, panes and layouts.
- Native FastAPI integration: We’ve added native support for running Panel apps on a FastAPI server.
- PY.CAFE support: You can now share your Panel apps online for free, thanks to PY.CAFE
- New components, improved Chat interface, improved contributor experience, etc.
And we have also released hvPlot 0.11! Together with the addition of a new integration for DuckDB, this version exposes more features from HoloViews like support for displaying subcoordinate y-axis, and new hover options; find out more in the blog post.
Andrew published a blog post on how to incorporate LLMs with data visualizations using HoloViz packages.
MDAnalysis
Here are some MDAnalysis updates:
- Two Google Summer of Code and one Outreachy contributor wrapped up their projects with MDAnalysis; follow the links to read more about the projects on the MDAnalysis blog.
- The 2024 MDAnalysis UGM (User Group Meeting) was held from August 21st — 23rd in London, United Kingdom. Sixty-five users and developers convened for talks on materials science applications, drug discovery and therapeutics, machine learning and multiscale modeling, and tools for molecular dynamics simulation analysis, as well as to participate in a hackathon event.
- MDAnalysis hosted a workshop in the CCPBioSim training week taking place at the University of Sheffield during the first week of September. For more information on MDAnalysis workshops hosted throughout 2024, check out this recap blog post.
conda
We’re excited to share updates on the latest conda releases and an important upcoming changes in channel management.
Conda September 2024 Releases: conda 24.9.0 and 24.9.1 have been released to both main and conda-forge channels.
Announcement: Following feedback from conda users about the pre-configuration of the conda code base to favor channels from Anaconda Inc., we’ve started the process to deprecate hardcoding Anaconda’s channels as the default set of channels in the conda source code, which is a remnant of conda’s incubation at the company.
In the future, we will rely on providers of conda distributions, such as miniforge or Anaconda (including miniconda), to pre-configure their preferred channels, e.g. by running the necessary conda config — set channels command.
We’ll also continue to work on improving channel management in the foreseeable future and would love your feedback.
Learn more in our release blog post.
Julia
Julia version 1.11.1, the first patch release in the 1.11 series of releases, is now available. Binaries are available via JuliaUp and at https://julialang.org/downloads/ for macOS (Intel and M-series processors), Windows (x86 and x86–64), glibc Linux (x86, x86–64, AArch64, and PowerPC), and FreeBSD (x86–64). Unfortunately, musl Linux binaries are not currently available for this release.
As a patch release, 1.11.1 contains no new features or breaking changes, only bug fixes, documentation improvements, and performance improvements. You can see the list of commits included since 1.11.0 here. We recommend that anyone currently using 1.11.0 upgrade to 1.11.1.
Note that 1.11 on GitHub Actions, Cirrus, Travis, and AppVeyor now refers to 1.11.1.
OpenMBEE
OpenMBEE hasofficially clicked off the development of the SysML version 2 API.
They are openly seeking those who would be interested in contributing to this new development. This includes model developers, software developers, and testers.
Affiliated Projects
TNL
We have started a YouTube channel where we explain how to develop parallel algorithms with TNL — https://www.youtube.com/@GPUProgrammingWithTNL. Currently, there are only a few episodes but we want to add more soon. If you find this interesting, feel free to add it to the newsletter.
Optuna
Here are our updates for Optuna.
Optuna 4.0 & OptunaHub is released! Check out the release notes for details.
You can easily use/share any sampler/pruner/visualization from https://hub.optuna.org/. Check out this blog post.
Artifact management features and JournalStorage (including file-based storage) are stabilized. Check out these resources:
- File Management during LLM (Large Language Model) Trainings by Optuna v4.0.0 Artifact Store
- Introducing the Stabilized JournalStorage in Optuna 4.0: From Mechanism to Use Case
Large speedup for multi-objective TPE sampler is made.
A new terminator algorithm (used for early termination of optimization) is added.
We have new algorithms in OptunaHub!
CatCMA: https://medium.com/optuna/introduction-to-catcma-in-optunahub-ffa316309cb8
The OptunaHub has a lot more. Check them out!
Imamura Hideaki & Shuhei Watanabe gave a presentation in AutoML Conference! Slides are available here: https://speakerdeck.com/pfn/20240909-automl-conference-optuna
toqito
toqito 1.1.0 has been released: https://pypi.org/project/toqito/
Release notes for this particular release can be found here: https://github.com/vprusso/toqito/releases/tag/v1.1.0
PyVista
PyVista is a library for creating stunning visuals of 3D scientific data.
PyVista’s latest release was in July 2024, which focused on ensuring compatibility with NumPy 2.0, upgrades for future compatibility with VTK, enhanced documentation hosting, and indexing by search engines. For a complete list of changes, visit the release notes and subsequent patch releases.
Need help getting the most out of PyVista? Reach out to info@pyvista.org and we can help connect you with community experts or organizations with deep expertise in scientific computing.
For more detailed updates and to stay connected with the PyVista community:
- GitHub Repository: https://github.com/pyvista/pyvista
- Documentation: https://docs.pyvista.org
- Discussions: https://github.com/pyvista/pyvista/discussions
Slack: https://slack.pyvista.org/
GPJax
We released v0.9 of GPJax. In this release, we migrated the backend of GPJax to Flax. The release information can be found here: https://github.com/JaxGaussianProcesses/GPJax/releases/tag/v0.9.0
