What's New in Python 3.8

Python 3.8 was officially available on October 14th 2019. Here are release highlights of the new features.

Table of Contents

New Features

Assignment Expressions
Positional-only parameters
Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode files
Debug build uses the same ABI as release build
f-strings support = for self-documenting expressions and debugging
PEP 578: Python Runtime Audit Hooks
PEP 587: Python Initialization Configuration
Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-bound data buffers

See details of these new features here

New Modules

The new importlib.metadata module provides (provisional) support for reading metadata from third-party packages.

For example, it can extract an installed package’s version number, list of entry points, and more:

>>> # Note following example requires that the popular "requests"
>>> # package has been installed.
>>>
>>> from importlib.metadata import version, requires, files
>>> version('requests')
'2.22.0'
>>> list(requires('requests'))
['chardet (<3.1.0,>=3.0.2)']
>>> list(files('requests'))[:5]
[PackagePath('requests-2.22.0.dist-info/INSTALLER'),
 PackagePath('requests-2.22.0.dist-info/LICENSE'),
 PackagePath('requests-2.22.0.dist-info/METADATA'),
 PackagePath('requests-2.22.0.dist-info/RECORD'),
 PackagePath('requests-2.22.0.dist-info/WHEEL')]

Improved Modules

ast
asyncio
builtins
collections
curses
ctypes
datetime
functools
gc
gettext
gzip
idlelib and IDLE
inspect
io
json.tool
math
mmap
multiprocessing
os
os.path
pathlib
pickle
plistlib
py_compile
shlex
shutil
socket
ssl
statistics
sys
tarfile
threading
tokenize
tkinter
time
typing
unicodedata
unittest
venv
weakref
xml

See all these improved modules details here

For more details about this update, please check out the What’s New in Python 3.8 at python.org

New Features

New Modules

Improved Modules

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