Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule for Python 3.8. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sized items.

Release Manager and Crew

• 3.8 Release Manager: Łukasz Langa
• Windows installers: Steve Dower
• Mac installers: Ned Deily
• Documentation: Julien Palard

3.8 Lifespan

3.8 will receive bugfix updates approximately every 2 months for approximately 18 months. Some time after the release of 3.9.0 final, the ninth and final 3.8 bugfix update was released. After that, security updates (source only) were released for 5 years until the release of Python 3.13.0 final.

As of 2024年10月07日, 3.8 has reached the end-of-life phase of its release cycle. 3.8.20 was the final security release. The codebase for 3.8 is now frozen and no further updates will be provided nor issues of any kind will be accepted on the bug tracker.

Release Schedule

Features for 3.8

Some of the notable features of Python 3.8 include:

• PEP 570, Positional-only arguments
• PEP 572, Assignment Expressions
• PEP 574, Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data
• PEP 578, Runtime audit hooks
• PEP 587, Python Initialization Configuration
• PEP 590, Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
• Typing-related: PEP 591 (Final qualifier), PEP 586 (Literal types), and PEP 589 (TypedDict)
• Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode
• Debug builds share ABI as release builds
• f-strings support a handy = specifier for debugging
• continue is now legal in finally: blocks
• on Windows, the default asyncio event loop is now ProactorEventLoop
• on macOS, the spawn start method is now used by default in multiprocessing
• multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoid pickling costs between processes
• typed_ast is merged back to CPython
• LOAD_GLOBAL is now 40% faster
• pickle now uses Protocol 4 by default, improving performance

There are many other interesting changes, please consult the "What’s New" page in the documentation for a full list.

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.