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Python 3.12.0rc2

Release Date: Sept. 6, 2023

This is the second release candidate of Python 3.12.0

This release, 3.12.0rc2, is the last release preview for Python 3.12.

There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.12 series. The intent is for the final release of 3.12.0, scheduled for Monday, 2023-10-02, to be identical to this release candidate. This is the last chance to find critical problems in Python 3.12.

Call to action

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.12 compatibilities during this phase, and where necessary publish Python 3.12 wheels on PyPI to be ready for the final release of 3.12.0. Any binary wheels built against Python 3.12.0rc2 will work with future versions of Python 3.12. As always, report any issues to the Python bug tracker.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and while it's as close to the final release as we can get it, its use is not recommended for production environments.

Core developers: time to work on documentation now

  • Are all your changes properly documented?
  • Are they mentioned in What's New?
  • Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Major new features of the 3.12 series, compared to 3.11

New features

Type annotations

Deprecations

  • The deprecated wstr and wstr_length members of the C implementation of unicode objects were removed, per PEP 623.
  • In the unittest module, a number of long deprecated methods and classes were removed. (They had been deprecated since Python 3.1 or 3.2).
  • The deprecated smtpd and distutils modules have been removed (see PEP 594 and PEP 632. The setuptools package continues to provide the distutils module.
  • A number of other old, broken and deprecated functions, classes and methods have been removed.
  • Invalid backslash escape sequences in strings now warn with SyntaxWarning instead of DeprecationWarning, making them more visible. (They will become syntax errors in the future.)
  • The internal representation of integers has changed in preparation for performance enhancements. (This should not affect most users as it is an internal detail, but it may cause problems for Cython-generated code.)

(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Thomas know.)

For more details on the changes to Python 3.12, see What's new in Python 3.12. The next scheduled release of Python 3.12 will be 3.12.0, the final release, currently scheduled for 2023-10-02.

More resources

Files

Version Operating System Description MD5 Sum File Size GPG Sigstore
Gzipped source tarball Source release 970d493c3e918282d964d5b54dfa9733 25.9 MB SIG .sigstore
XZ compressed source tarball Source release c6da177d411956a24f15988e22dcfdb8 19.6 MB SIG .sigstore
macOS 64-bit universal2 installer macOS for macOS 10.9 and later 0536788192c01e1c0a056394a02a19c9 43.2 MB SIG .sigstore
Windows installer (64-bit) Windows Recommended ea1993b5227fa4c8f45a06f5fbdd23b3 25.3 MB SIG .sigstore
Windows installer (32-bit) Windows c7bfbde3b07a7bd013043640ca475b8c 24.0 MB SIG .sigstore
Windows installer (ARM64) Windows Experimental c5ea6e3fbbdf15a93919b756a755b026 24.5 MB SIG .sigstore
Windows embeddable package (64-bit) Windows 10208bc768a0dd6f042e3c6d6a8c0ca2 10.5 MB SIG .sigstore
Windows embeddable package (32-bit) Windows 5d63a5ee6fd3bb7e39ee6449114b51fd 9.4 MB SIG .sigstore
Windows embeddable package (ARM64) Windows af596badf2e0144831bacf7d3bb6988f 9.8 MB SIG .sigstore