What’s New In Python 3.6¶
- Editors
Elvis Pranskevichus <elvis@magic.io>, Yury Selivanov <yury@magic.io>
This article explains the new features in Python 3.6, compared to 3.5. Python 3.6 was released on December 23, 2016. See the changelog for a full list of changes.
See also
PEP 494 - Python 3.6 Release Schedule
Summary – Release highlights¶
New syntax features:
PEP 498, formatted string literals.
PEP 515, underscores in numeric literals.
PEP 526, syntax for variable annotations.
PEP 525, asynchronous generators.
PEP 530: asynchronous comprehensions.
New library modules:
CPython implementation improvements:
The dict type has been reimplemented to use a more compact representation based on a proposal by Raymond Hettinger and similar to the PyPy dict implementation. This resulted in dictionaries using 20% to 25% less memory when compared to Python 3.5.
Customization of class creation has been simplified with the new protocol.
The class attribute definition order is now preserved.
The order of elements in
**kwargs
now corresponds to the order in which keyword arguments were passed to the function.DTrace and SystemTap probing support has been added.
The new PYTHONMALLOC environment variable can now be used to debug the interpreter memory allocation and access errors.
Significant improvements in the standard library:
The
asyncio
module has received new features, significant usability and performance improvements, and a fair amount of bug fixes. Starting with Python 3.6 theasyncio
module is no longer provisional and its API is considered stable.A new file system path protocol has been implemented to support path-like objects. All standard library functions operating on paths have been updated to work with the new protocol.
The
datetime
module has gained support for Local Time Disambiguation.The
typing
module received a number of improvements.The
tracemalloc
module has been significantly reworked and is now used to provide better output forResourceWarning
as well as provide better diagnostics for memory allocation errors. See the PYTHONMALLOC section for more information.
Security improvements:
The new
secrets
module has been added to simplify the generation of cryptographically strong pseudo-random numbers suitable for managing secrets such as account authentication, tokens, and similar.On Linux,
os.urandom()
now blocks until the system urandom entropy pool is initialized to increase the security. See the PEP 524 for the rationale.The default settings and feature set of the
ssl
module have been improved.The
hashlib
module received support for the BLAKE2, SHA-3 and SHAKE hash algorithms and thescrypt()
key derivation function.
Windows improvements:
PEP 528 and PEP 529, Windows filesystem and console encoding changed to UTF-8.
The
py.exe
launcher, when used interactively, no longer prefers Python 2 over Python 3 when the user doesn’t specify a version (via command line arguments or a config file). Handling of shebang lines remains unchanged - “python” refers to Python 2 in that case.python.exe
andpythonw.exe
have been marked as long-path aware, which means that the 260 character path limit may no longer apply. See removing the MAX_PATH limitation for details.A
._pth
file can be added to force isolated mode and fully specify all search paths to avoid registry and environment lookup. See the documentation for more information.A
python36.zip
file now works as a landmark to inferPYTHONHOME
. See the documentation for more information.
New Features¶
PEP 498: Formatted string literals¶
PEP 498 introduces a new kind of string literals: f-strings, or formatted string literals.
Formatted string literals are prefixed with 'f'
and are similar to
the format strings accepted by str.format()
. They contain replacement
fields surrounded by curly braces. The replacement fields are expressions,
which are evaluated at run time, and then formatted using the
format()
protocol:
>>> name = "Fred"
>>> f"He said his name is {name}."
'He said his name is Fred.'
>>> width = 10
>>> precision = 4
>>> value = decimal.Decimal("12.34567")
>>> f"result: {value:{width}.{precision}}" # nested fields
'result: 12.35'
See also
- PEP 498 – Literal String Interpolation.
PEP written and implemented by Eric V. Smith.
PEP 526: Syntax for variable annotations¶
PEP 484 introduced the standard for type annotations of function parameters, a.k.a. type hints. This PEP adds syntax to Python for annotating the types of variables including class variables and instance variables:
primes: List[int] = []
captain: str # Note: no initial value!
class Starship:
stats: Dict[str, int] = {}
Just as for function annotations, the Python interpreter does not attach any
particular meaning to variable annotations and only stores them in the
__annotations__
attribute of a class or module.
In contrast to variable declarations in statically typed languages,
the goal of annotation syntax is to provide an easy way to specify structured
type metadata for third party tools and libraries via the abstract syntax tree
and the __annotations__
attribute.
PEP 515: Underscores in Numeric Literals¶
PEP 515 adds the ability to use underscores in numeric literals for improved readability. For example:
>>> 1_000_000_000_000_000
1000000000000000
>>> 0x_FF_FF_FF_FF
4294967295
Single underscores are allowed between digits and after any base specifier. Leading, trailing, or multiple underscores in a row are not allowed.
The string formatting language also now has support
for the '_'
option to signal the use of an underscore for a thousands
separator for floating point presentation types and for integer
presentation type 'd'
. For integer presentation types 'b'
,
'o'
, 'x'
, and 'X'
, underscores will be inserted every 4
digits:
>>> '{:_}'.format(1000000)
'1_000_000'
>>> '{:_x}'.format(0xFFFFFFFF)
'ffff_ffff'
See also
- PEP 515 – Underscores in Numeric Literals
PEP written by Georg Brandl and Serhiy Storchaka.
PEP 525: Asynchronous Generators¶
PEP 492 introduced support for native coroutines and async
/ await
syntax to Python 3.5. A notable limitation of the Python 3.5 implementation
is that it was not possible to use await
and yield
in the same
function body. In Python 3.6 this restriction has been lifted, making it
possible to define asynchronous generators:
async def ticker(delay, to):
"""Yield numbers from 0 to *to* every *delay* seconds."""
for i in range(to):
yield i
await asyncio.sleep(delay)
The new syntax allows for faster and more concise code.
See also
- PEP 525 – Asynchronous Generators
PEP written and implemented by Yury Selivanov.
PEP 530: Asynchronous Comprehensions¶
PEP 530 adds support for using async for
in list, set, dict
comprehensions and generator expressions:
result = [i async for i in aiter() if i % 2]
Additionally, await
expressions are supported in all kinds
of comprehensions:
result = [await fun() for fun in funcs if await condition()]
See also
- PEP 530 – Asynchronous Comprehensions
PEP written and implemented by Yury Selivanov.
PEP 487: Simpler customization of class creation¶
It is now possible to customize subclass creation without using a metaclass.
The new __init_subclass__
classmethod will be called on the base class
whenever a new subclass is created:
class PluginBase:
subclasses = []
def __init_subclass__(cls, **kwargs):
super().__init_subclass__(**kwargs)
cls.subclasses.append(cls)
class Plugin1(PluginBase):
pass
class Plugin2(PluginBase):
pass
In order to allow zero-argument super()
calls to work correctly from
__init_subclass__()
implementations, custom metaclasses must
ensure that the new __classcell__
namespace entry is propagated to
type.__new__
(as described in Creating the class object).
See also
- PEP 487 – Simpler customization of class creation
PEP written and implemented by Martin Teichmann.
PEP 487: Descriptor Protocol Enhancements¶
PEP 487 extends the descriptor protocol to include the new optional
__set_name__()
method. Whenever a new class is defined, the new
method will be called on all descriptors included in the definition, providing
them with a reference to the class being defined and the name given to the
descriptor within the class namespace. In other words, instances of
descriptors can now know the attribute name of the descriptor in the
owner class:
class IntField:
def __get__(self, instance, owner):
return instance.__dict__[self.name]
def __set__(self, instance, value):
if not isinstance(value, int):
raise ValueError(f'expecting integer in {self.name}')
instance.__dict__[self.name] = value
# this is the new initializer:
def __set_name__(self, owner, name):
self.name = name
class Model:
int_field = IntField()
See also
- PEP 487 – Simpler customization of class creation
PEP written and implemented by Martin Teichmann.
PEP 519: Adding a file system path protocol¶
File system paths have historically been represented as str
or bytes
objects. This has led to people who write code which
operate on file system paths to assume that such objects are only one
of those two types (an int
representing a file descriptor
does not count as that is not a file path). Unfortunately that
assumption prevents alternative object representations of file system
paths like pathlib
from working with pre-existing code,
including Python’s standard library.
To fix this situation, a new interface represented by
os.PathLike
has been defined. By implementing the
__fspath__()
method, an object signals that it
represents a path. An object can then provide a low-level
representation of a file system path as a str
or
bytes
object. This means an object is considered
path-like if it implements
os.PathLike
or is a str
or bytes
object
which represents a file system path. Code can use os.fspath()
,
os.fsdecode()
, or os.fsencode()
to explicitly get a
str
and/or bytes
representation of a path-like
object.
The built-in open()
function has been updated to accept
os.PathLike
objects, as have all relevant functions in the
os
and os.path
modules, and most other functions and
classes in the standard library. The os.DirEntry
class
and relevant classes in pathlib
have also been updated to
implement os.PathLike
.
The hope is that updating the fundamental functions for operating
on file system paths will lead to third-party code to implicitly
support all path-like objects without any
code changes, or at least very minimal ones (e.g. calling
os.fspath()
at the beginning of code before operating on a
path-like object).
Here are some examples of how the new interface allows for
pathlib.Path
to be used more easily and transparently with
pre-existing code:
>>> import pathlib
>>> with open(pathlib.Path("README")) as f:
... contents = f.read()
...
>>> import os.path
>>> os.path.splitext(pathlib.Path("some_file.txt"))
('some_file', '.txt')
>>> os.path.join("/a/b", pathlib.Path("c"))
'/a/b/c'
>>> import os
>>> os.fspath(pathlib.Path("some_file.txt"))
'some_file.txt'
(Implemented by Brett Cannon, Ethan Furman, Dusty Phillips, and Jelle Zijlstra.)
See also
- PEP 519 – Adding a file system path protocol
PEP written by Brett Cannon and Koos Zevenhoven.
PEP 495: Local Time Disambiguation¶
In most world locations, there have been and will be times when local clocks are moved back. In those times, intervals are introduced in which local clocks show the same time twice in the same day. In these situations, the information displayed on a local clock (or stored in a Python datetime instance) is insufficient to identify a particular moment in time.
PEP 495 adds the new fold attribute to instances of
datetime.datetime
and datetime.time
classes to differentiate
between two moments in time for which local times are the same:
>>> u0 = datetime(2016, 11, 6, 4, tzinfo=timezone.utc)
>>> for i in range(4):
... u = u0 + i*HOUR
... t = u.astimezone(Eastern)
... print(u.time(), 'UTC =', t.time(), t.tzname(), t.fold)
...
04:00:00 UTC = 00:00:00 EDT 0
05:00:00 UTC = 01:00:00 EDT 0
06:00:00 UTC = 01:00:00 EST 1
07:00:00 UTC = 02:00:00 EST 0
The values of the fold
attribute have the
value 0
for all instances except those that represent the second
(chronologically) moment in time in an ambiguous case.
See also
- PEP 495 – Local Time Disambiguation
PEP written by Alexander Belopolsky and Tim Peters, implementation by Alexander Belopolsky.
PEP 529: Change Windows filesystem encoding to UTF-8¶
Representing filesystem paths is best performed with str (Unicode) rather than bytes. However, there are some situations where using bytes is sufficient and correct.
Prior to Python 3.6, data loss could result when using bytes paths on Windows.
With this change, using bytes to represent paths is now supported on Windows,
provided those bytes are encoded with the encoding returned by
sys.getfilesystemencoding()
, which now defaults to 'utf-8'
.
Applications that do not use str to represent paths should use
os.fsencode()
and os.fsdecode()
to ensure their bytes are
correctly encoded. To revert to the previous behaviour, set
PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSFSENCODING
or call
sys._enablelegacywindowsfsencoding()
.
See PEP 529 for more information and discussion of code modifications that may be required.
PEP 528: Change Windows console encoding to UTF-8¶
The default console on Windows will now accept all Unicode characters and
provide correctly read str objects to Python code. sys.stdin
,
sys.stdout
and sys.stderr
now default to utf-8 encoding.
This change only applies when using an interactive console, and not when
redirecting files or pipes. To revert to the previous behaviour for interactive
console use, set PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO
.
See also
- PEP 528 – Change Windows console encoding to UTF-8
PEP written and implemented by Steve Dower.
PEP 520: Preserving Class Attribute Definition Order¶
Attributes in a class definition body have a natural ordering: the same
order in which the names appear in the source. This order is now
preserved in the new class’s __dict__
attribute.
Also, the effective default class execution namespace (returned from type.__prepare__()) is now an insertion-order-preserving mapping.
See also
- PEP 520 – Preserving Class Attribute Definition Order
PEP written and implemented by Eric Snow.
PEP 468: Preserving Keyword Argument Order¶
**kwargs
in a function signature is now guaranteed to be an
insertion-order-preserving mapping.
See also
- PEP 468 – Preserving Keyword Argument Order
PEP written and implemented by Eric Snow.
New dict implementation¶
The dict type now uses a “compact” representation
based on a proposal by Raymond Hettinger
which was first implemented by PyPy.
The memory usage of the new dict()
is between 20% and 25% smaller
compared to Python 3.5.
The order-preserving aspect of this new implementation is considered an implementation detail and should not be relied upon (this may change in the future, but it is desired to have this new dict implementation in the language for a few releases before changing the language spec to mandate order-preserving semantics for all current and future Python implementations; this also helps preserve backwards-compatibility with older versions of the language where random iteration order is still in effect, e.g. Python 3.5).
(Contributed by INADA Naoki in bpo-27350. Idea originally suggested by Raymond Hettinger.)
PEP 523: Adding a frame evaluation API to CPython¶
While Python provides extensive support to customize how code executes, one place it has not done so is in the evaluation of frame objects. If you wanted some way to intercept frame evaluation in Python there really wasn’t any way without directly manipulating function pointers for defined functions.
PEP 523 changes this by providing an API to make frame evaluation pluggable at the C level. This will allow for tools such as debuggers and JITs to intercept frame evaluation before the execution of Python code begins. This enables the use of alternative evaluation implementations for Python code, tracking frame evaluation, etc.
This API is not part of the limited C API and is marked as private to signal that usage of this API is expected to be limited and only applicable to very select, low-level use-cases. Semantics of the API will change with Python as necessary.
See also
- PEP 523 – Adding a frame evaluation API to CPython
PEP written by Brett Cannon and Dino Viehland.
PYTHONMALLOC environment variable¶
The new PYTHONMALLOC
environment variable allows setting the Python
memory allocators and installing debug hooks.
It is now possible to install debug hooks on Python memory allocators on Python
compiled in release mode using PYTHONMALLOC=debug
. Effects of debug hooks:
Newly allocated memory is filled with the byte
0xCB
Freed memory is filled with the byte
0xDB
Detect violations of the Python memory allocator API. For example,
PyObject_Free()
called on a memory block allocated byPyMem_Malloc()
.Detect writes before the start of a buffer (buffer underflows)
Detect writes after the end of a buffer (buffer overflows)
Check that the GIL is held when allocator functions of
PYMEM_DOMAIN_OBJ
(ex:PyObject_Malloc()
) andPYMEM_DOMAIN_MEM
(ex:PyMem_Malloc()
) domains are called.
Checking if the GIL is held is also a new feature of Python 3.6.
See the PyMem_SetupDebugHooks()
function for debug hooks on Python
memory allocators.
It is now also possible to force the usage of the malloc()
allocator of
the C library for all Python memory allocations using PYTHONMALLOC=malloc
.
This is helpful when using external memory debuggers like Valgrind on
a Python compiled in release mode.
On error, the debug hooks on Python memory allocators now use the
tracemalloc
module to get the traceback where a memory block was
allocated.
Example of fatal error on buffer overflow using
python3.6 -X tracemalloc=5
(store 5 frames in traces):
Debug memory block at address p=0x7fbcd41666f8: API 'o'
4 bytes originally requested
The 7 pad bytes at p-7 are FORBIDDENBYTE, as expected.
The 8 pad bytes at tail=0x7fbcd41666fc are not all FORBIDDENBYTE (0xfb):
at tail+0: 0x02 *** OUCH
at tail+1: 0xfb
at tail+2: 0xfb
at tail+3: 0xfb
at tail+4: 0xfb
at tail+5: 0xfb
at tail+6: 0xfb
at tail+7: 0xfb
The block was made by call #1233329 to debug malloc/realloc.
Data at p: 1a 2b 30 00
Memory block allocated at (most recent call first):
File "test/test_bytes.py", line 323
File "unittest/case.py", line 600
File "unittest/case.py", line 648
File "unittest/suite.py", line 122
File "unittest/suite.py", line 84
Fatal Python error: bad trailing pad byte
Current thread 0x00007fbcdbd32700 (most recent call first):
File "test/test_bytes.py", line 323 in test_hex
File "unittest/case.py", line 600 in run
File "unittest/case.py", line 648 in __call__
File "unittest/suite.py", line 122 in run
File "unittest/suite.py", line 84 in __call__
File "unittest/suite.py", line 122 in run
File "unittest/suite.py", line 84 in __call__
...
DTrace and SystemTap probing support¶
Python can now be built --with-dtrace
which enables static markers
for the following events in the interpreter:
function call/return
garbage collection started/finished
line of code executed.
This can be used to instrument running interpreters in production, without the need to recompile specific debug builds or providing application-specific profiling/debugging code.
More details in Instrumenting CPython with DTrace and SystemTap.
The current implementation is tested on Linux and macOS. Additional markers may be added in the future.
(Contributed by Łukasz Langa in bpo-21590, based on patches by Jesús Cea Avión, David Malcolm, and Nikhil Benesch.)
Other Language Changes¶
Some smaller changes made to the core Python language are:
A
global
ornonlocal
statement must now textually appear before the first use of the affected name in the same scope. Previously this was aSyntaxWarning
.It is now possible to set a special method to
None
to indicate that the corresponding operation is not available. For example, if a class sets__iter__()
toNone
, the class is not iterable. (Contributed by Andrew Barnert and Ivan Levkivskyi in bpo-25958.)Long sequences of repeated traceback lines are now abbreviated as
"[Previous line repeated {count} more times]"
(see traceback for an example). (Contributed by Emanuel Barry in bpo-26823.)Import now raises the new exception
ModuleNotFoundError
(subclass ofImportError
) when it cannot find a module. Code that currently checks for ImportError (in try-except) will still work. (Contributed by Eric Snow in bpo-15767.)Class methods relying on zero-argument
super()
will now work correctly when called from metaclass methods during class creation. (Contributed by Martin Teichmann in bpo-23722.)
New Modules¶
secrets¶
The main purpose of the new secrets
module is to provide an obvious way
to reliably generate cryptographically strong pseudo-random values suitable
for managing secrets, such as account authentication, tokens, and similar.
Warning
Note that the pseudo-random generators in the random
module
should NOT be used for security purposes. Use secrets
on Python 3.6+ and os.urandom()
on Python 3.5 and earlier.
See also
- PEP 506 – Adding A Secrets Module To The Standard Library
PEP written and implemented by Steven D’Aprano.
Improved Modules¶
array¶
Exhausted iterators of array.array
will now stay exhausted even
if the iterated array is extended. This is consistent with the behavior
of other mutable sequences.
Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-26492.
ast¶
The new ast.Constant
AST node has been added. It can be used
by external AST optimizers for the purposes of constant folding.
Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-26146.
asyncio¶
Starting with Python 3.6 the asyncio
module is no longer provisional and its
API is considered stable.
Notable changes in the asyncio
module since Python 3.5.0
(all backported to 3.5.x due to the provisional status):
The
get_event_loop()
function has been changed to always return the currently running loop when called from coroutines and callbacks. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-28613.)The
ensure_future()
function and all functions that use it, such asloop.run_until_complete()
, now accept all kinds of awaitable objects. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)New
run_coroutine_threadsafe()
function to submit coroutines to event loops from other threads. (Contributed by Vincent Michel.)New
Transport.is_closing()
method to check if the transport is closing or closed. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov.)The
loop.create_server()
method can now accept a list of hosts. (Contributed by Yann Sionneau.)New
loop.create_future()
method to create Future objects. This allows alternative event loop implementations, such as uvloop, to provide a fasterasyncio.Future
implementation. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-27041.)New
loop.get_exception_handler()
method to get the current exception handler. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-27040.)New
StreamReader.readuntil()
method to read data from the stream until a separator bytes sequence appears. (Contributed by Mark Korenberg.)The performance of
StreamReader.readexactly()
has been improved. (Contributed by Mark Korenberg in bpo-28370.)The
loop.getaddrinfo()
method is optimized to avoid calling the systemgetaddrinfo
function if the address is already resolved. (Contributed by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.)The
loop.stop()
method has been changed to stop the loop immediately after the current iteration. Any new callbacks scheduled as a result of the last iteration will be discarded. (Contributed by Guido van Rossum in bpo-25593.)Future.set_exception
will now raiseTypeError
when passed an instance of theStopIteration
exception. (Contributed by Chris Angelico in bpo-26221.)New
loop.connect_accepted_socket()
method to be used by servers that accept connections outside of asyncio, but that use asyncio to handle them. (Contributed by Jim Fulton in bpo-27392.)TCP_NODELAY
flag is now set for all TCP transports by default. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-27456.)New
loop.shutdown_asyncgens()
to properly close pending asynchronous generators before closing the loop. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-28003.)Future
andTask
classes now have an optimized C implementation which makes asyncio code up to 30% faster. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov and INADA Naoki in bpo-26081 and bpo-28544.)
binascii¶
The b2a_base64()
function now accepts an optional newline
keyword argument to control whether the newline character is appended to the
return value.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25357.)
cmath¶
The new cmath.tau
(τ) constant has been added.
(Contributed by Lisa Roach in bpo-12345, see PEP 628 for details.)
New constants: cmath.inf
and cmath.nan
to
match math.inf
and math.nan
, and also cmath.infj
and cmath.nanj
to match the format used by complex repr.
(Contributed by Mark Dickinson in bpo-23229.)
collections¶
The new Collection
abstract base class has been
added to represent sized iterable container classes.
(Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi, docs by Neil Girdhar in bpo-27598.)
The new Reversible
abstract base class represents
iterable classes that also provide the __reversed__()
method.
(Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in bpo-25987.)
The new AsyncGenerator
abstract base class represents
asynchronous generators.
(Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-28720.)
The namedtuple()
function now accepts an optional
keyword argument module, which, when specified, is used for
the __module__
attribute of the returned named tuple class.
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-17941.)
The verbose and rename arguments for
namedtuple()
are now keyword-only.
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-25628.)
Recursive collections.deque
instances can now be pickled.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-26482.)
concurrent.futures¶
The ThreadPoolExecutor
class constructor now accepts an optional thread_name_prefix argument
to make it possible to customize the names of the threads created by the
pool.
(Contributed by Gregory P. Smith in bpo-27664.)
contextlib¶
The contextlib.AbstractContextManager
class has been added to
provide an abstract base class for context managers. It provides a
sensible default implementation for __enter__() which returns
self
and leaves __exit__() an abstract method. A matching
class has been added to the typing
module as
typing.ContextManager
.
(Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-25609.)
datetime¶
The datetime
and time
classes have
the new fold
attribute used to disambiguate local time
when necessary. Many functions in the datetime
have been
updated to support local time disambiguation.
See Local Time Disambiguation section for more
information.
(Contributed by Alexander Belopolsky in bpo-24773.)
The datetime.strftime()
and
date.strftime()
methods now support
ISO 8601 date directives %G
, %u
and %V
.
(Contributed by Ashley Anderson in bpo-12006.)
The datetime.isoformat()
function
now accepts an optional timespec argument that specifies the number
of additional components of the time value to include.
(Contributed by Alessandro Cucci and Alexander Belopolsky in bpo-19475.)
The datetime.combine()
now
accepts an optional tzinfo argument.
(Contributed by Alexander Belopolsky in bpo-27661.)
decimal¶
New Decimal.as_integer_ratio()
method that returns a pair (n, d)
of integers that represent the given
Decimal
instance as a fraction, in lowest terms and
with a positive denominator:
>>> Decimal('-3.14').as_integer_ratio()
(-157, 50)
(Contributed by Stefan Krah amd Mark Dickinson in bpo-25928.)
distutils¶
The default_format
attribute has been removed from
distutils.command.sdist.sdist
and the formats
attribute defaults to ['gztar']
. Although not anticipated,
any code relying on the presence of default_format
may
need to be adapted. See bpo-27819 for more details.
email¶
The new email API, enabled via the policy keyword to various constructors, is
no longer provisional. The email
documentation has been reorganized and
rewritten to focus on the new API, while retaining the old documentation for
the legacy API. (Contributed by R. David Murray in bpo-24277.)
The email.mime
classes now all accept an optional policy keyword.
(Contributed by Berker Peksag in bpo-27331.)
The DecodedGenerator
now supports the policy
keyword.
There is a new policy
attribute,
message_factory
, that controls what class is used
by default when the parser creates new message objects. For the
email.policy.compat32
policy this is Message
,
for the new policies it is EmailMessage
.
(Contributed by R. David Murray in bpo-20476.)
encodings¶
On Windows, added the 'oem'
encoding to use CP_OEMCP
, and the 'ansi'
alias for the existing 'mbcs'
encoding, which uses the CP_ACP
code page.
(Contributed by Steve Dower in bpo-27959.)
enum¶
Two new enumeration base classes have been added to the enum
module:
Flag
and IntFlags
. Both are used to define
constants that can be combined using the bitwise operators.
(Contributed by Ethan Furman in bpo-23591.)
Many standard library modules have been updated to use the
IntFlags
class for their constants.
The new enum.auto
value can be used to assign values to enum
members automatically:
>>> from enum import Enum, auto
>>> class Color(Enum):
... red = auto()
... blue = auto()
... green = auto()
...
>>> list(Color)
[<Color.red: 1>, <Color.blue: 2>, <Color.green: 3>]
faulthandler¶
On Windows, the faulthandler
module now installs a handler for Windows
exceptions: see faulthandler.enable()
. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in
bpo-23848.)
fileinput¶
hook_encoded()
now supports the errors argument.
(Contributed by Joseph Hackman in bpo-25788.)
hashlib¶
hashlib
supports OpenSSL 1.1.0. The minimum recommend version is 1.0.2.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-26470.)
BLAKE2 hash functions were added to the module. blake2b()
and blake2s()
are always available and support the full
feature set of BLAKE2.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-26798 based on code by
Dmitry Chestnykh and Samuel Neves. Documentation written by Dmitry Chestnykh.)
The SHA-3 hash functions sha3_224()
, sha3_256()
,
sha3_384()
, sha3_512()
, and SHAKE hash functions
shake_128()
and shake_256()
were added.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-16113. Keccak Code Package
by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, Gilles Van Assche, and
Ronny Van Keer.)
The password-based key derivation function scrypt()
is now
available with OpenSSL 1.1.0 and newer.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-27928.)
http.client¶
HTTPConnection.request()
and
endheaders()
both now support
chunked encoding request bodies.
(Contributed by Demian Brecht and Rolf Krahl in bpo-12319.)
idlelib and IDLE¶
The idlelib package is being modernized and refactored to make IDLE look and work better and to make the code easier to understand, test, and improve. Part of making IDLE look better, especially on Linux and Mac, is using ttk widgets, mostly in the dialogs. As a result, IDLE no longer runs with tcl/tk 8.4. It now requires tcl/tk 8.5 or 8.6. We recommend running the latest release of either.
‘Modernizing’ includes renaming and consolidation of idlelib modules. The renaming of files with partial uppercase names is similar to the renaming of, for instance, Tkinter and TkFont to tkinter and tkinter.font in 3.0. As a result, imports of idlelib files that worked in 3.5 will usually not work in 3.6. At least a module name change will be needed (see idlelib/README.txt), sometimes more. (Name changes contributed by Al Swiegart and Terry Reedy in bpo-24225. Most idlelib patches since have been and will be part of the process.)
In compensation, the eventual result with be that some idlelib classes will be easier to use, with better APIs and docstrings explaining them. Additional useful information will be added to idlelib when available.
New in 3.6.2:
Multiple fixes for autocompletion. (Contributed by Louie Lu in bpo-15786.)
New in 3.6.3:
Module Browser (on the File menu, formerly called Class Browser), now displays nested functions and classes in addition to top-level functions and classes. (Contributed by Guilherme Polo, Cheryl Sabella, and Terry Jan Reedy in bpo-1612262.)
The IDLE features formerly implemented as extensions have been reimplemented as normal features. Their settings have been moved from the Extensions tab to other dialog tabs. (Contributed by Charles Wohlganger and Terry Jan Reedy in bpo-27099.)
The Settings dialog (Options, Configure IDLE) has been partly rewritten to improve both appearance and function. (Contributed by Cheryl Sabella and Terry Jan Reedy in multiple issues.)
New in 3.6.4:
The font sample now includes a selection of non-Latin characters so that users can better see the effect of selecting a particular font. (Contributed by Terry Jan Reedy in bpo-13802.) The sample can be edited to include other characters. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-31860.)
New in 3.6.6:
Editor code context option revised. Box displays all context lines up to maxlines. Clicking on a context line jumps the editor to that line. Context colors for custom themes is added to Highlights tab of Settings dialog. (Contributed by Cheryl Sabella and Terry Jan Reedy in bpo-33642, bpo-33768, and bpo-33679.)
On Windows, a new API call tells Windows that tk scales for DPI. On Windows 8.1+ or 10, with DPI compatibility properties of the Python binary unchanged, and a monitor resolution greater than 96 DPI, this should make text and lines sharper. It should otherwise have no effect. (Contributed by Terry Jan Reedy in bpo-33656.)
New in 3.6.7:
Output over N lines (50 by default) is squeezed down to a button. N can be changed in the PyShell section of the General page of the Settings dialog. Fewer, but possibly extra long, lines can be squeezed by right clicking on the output. Squeezed output can be expanded in place by double-clicking the button or into the clipboard or a separate window by right-clicking the button. (Contributed by Tal Einat in bpo-1529353.)
importlib¶
Import now raises the new exception ModuleNotFoundError
(subclass of ImportError
) when it cannot find a module. Code
that current checks for ImportError
(in try-except) will still work.
(Contributed by Eric Snow in bpo-15767.)
importlib.util.LazyLoader
now calls
create_module()
on the wrapped loader, removing the
restriction that importlib.machinery.BuiltinImporter
and
importlib.machinery.ExtensionFileLoader
couldn’t be used with
importlib.util.LazyLoader
.
importlib.util.cache_from_source()
,
importlib.util.source_from_cache()
, and
importlib.util.spec_from_file_location()
now accept a
path-like object.
inspect¶
The inspect.signature()
function now reports the
implicit .0
parameters generated by the compiler for comprehension and
generator expression scopes as if they were positional-only parameters called
implicit0
. (Contributed by Jelle Zijlstra in bpo-19611.)
To reduce code churn when upgrading from Python 2.7 and the legacy
inspect.getargspec()
API, the previously documented deprecation of
inspect.getfullargspec()
has been reversed. While this function is
convenient for single/source Python 2/3 code bases, the richer
inspect.signature()
interface remains the recommended approach for new
code. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan in bpo-27172)
json¶
json.load()
and json.loads()
now support binary input. Encoded
JSON should be represented using either UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-17909.)
logging¶
The new WatchedFileHandler.reopenIfNeeded()
method has been added to add the ability to check if the log file needs to
be reopened.
(Contributed by Marian Horban in bpo-24884.)
math¶
The tau (τ) constant has been added to the math
and cmath
modules.
(Contributed by Lisa Roach in bpo-12345, see PEP 628 for details.)
multiprocessing¶
Proxy Objects returned by
multiprocessing.Manager()
can now be nested.
(Contributed by Davin Potts in bpo-6766.)
os¶
See the summary of PEP 519 for details on how the
os
and os.path
modules now support
path-like objects.
scandir()
now supports bytes
paths on Windows.
A new close()
method allows explicitly closing a
scandir()
iterator. The scandir()
iterator now
supports the context manager protocol. If a scandir()
iterator is neither exhausted nor explicitly closed a ResourceWarning
will be emitted in its destructor.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25994.)
On Linux, os.urandom()
now blocks until the system urandom entropy pool
is initialized to increase the security. See the PEP 524 for the rationale.
The Linux getrandom()
syscall (get random bytes) is now exposed as the new
os.getrandom()
function.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner, part of the PEP 524)
pathlib¶
pathlib
now supports path-like objects.
(Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-27186.)
See the summary of PEP 519 for details.
pdb¶
The Pdb
class constructor has a new optional readrc argument
to control whether .pdbrc
files should be read.
pickle¶
Objects that need __new__
called with keyword arguments can now be pickled
using pickle protocols older than protocol version 4.
Protocol version 4 already supports this case. (Contributed by Serhiy
Storchaka in bpo-24164.)
pickletools¶
pickletools.dis()
now outputs the implicit memo index for the
MEMOIZE
opcode.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25382.)
pydoc¶
The pydoc
module has learned to respect the MANPAGER
environment variable.
(Contributed by Matthias Klose in bpo-8637.)
help()
and pydoc
can now list named tuple fields in the
order they were defined rather than alphabetically.
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-24879.)
random¶
The new choices()
function returns a list of elements of
specified size from the given population with optional weights.
(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-18844.)
re¶
Added support of modifier spans in regular expressions. Examples:
'(?i:p)ython'
matches 'python'
and 'Python'
, but not 'PYTHON'
;
'(?i)g(?-i:v)r'
matches 'GvR'
and 'gvr'
, but not 'GVR'
.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-433028.)
Match object groups can be accessed by __getitem__
, which is
equivalent to group()
. So mo['name']
is now equivalent to
mo.group('name')
. (Contributed by Eric Smith in bpo-24454.)
Match
objects now support
index-like objects
as group
indices.
(Contributed by Jeroen Demeyer and Xiang Zhang in bpo-27177.)
readline¶
Added set_auto_history()
to enable or disable
automatic addition of input to the history list. (Contributed by
Tyler Crompton in bpo-26870.)
rlcompleter¶
Private and special attribute names now are omitted unless the prefix starts with underscores. A space or a colon is added after some completed keywords. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25011 and bpo-25209.)
shlex¶
The shlex
has much
improved shell compatibility
through the new punctuation_chars argument to control which characters
are treated as punctuation.
(Contributed by Vinay Sajip in bpo-1521950.)
site¶
When specifying paths to add to sys.path
in a .pth file,
you may now specify file paths on top of directories (e.g. zip files).
(Contributed by Wolfgang Langner in bpo-26587).
sqlite3¶
sqlite3.Cursor.lastrowid
now supports the REPLACE
statement.
(Contributed by Alex LordThorsen in bpo-16864.)
socket¶
The ioctl()
function now supports the
SIO_LOOPBACK_FAST_PATH
control code.
(Contributed by Daniel Stokes in bpo-26536.)
The getsockopt()
constants SO_DOMAIN
,
SO_PROTOCOL
, SO_PEERSEC
, and SO_PASSSEC
are now supported.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-26907.)
The setsockopt()
now supports the
setsockopt(level, optname, None, optlen: int)
form.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-27744.)
The socket module now supports the address family
AF_ALG
to interface with Linux Kernel crypto API. ALG_*
,
SOL_ALG
and sendmsg_afalg()
were added.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-27744 with support from
Victor Stinner.)
New Linux constants TCP_USER_TIMEOUT
and TCP_CONGESTION
were added.
(Contributed by Omar Sandoval, issue:26273).
socketserver¶
Servers based on the socketserver
module, including those
defined in http.server
, xmlrpc.server
and
wsgiref.simple_server
, now support the context manager
protocol.
(Contributed by Aviv Palivoda in bpo-26404.)
The wfile
attribute of
StreamRequestHandler
classes now implements
the io.BufferedIOBase
writable interface. In particular,
calling write()
is now guaranteed to send the
data in full. (Contributed by Martin Panter in bpo-26721.)
ssl¶
ssl
supports OpenSSL 1.1.0. The minimum recommend version is 1.0.2.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-26470.)
3DES has been removed from the default cipher suites and ChaCha20 Poly1305 cipher suites have been added. (Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-27850 and bpo-27766.)
SSLContext
has better default configuration for options
and ciphers.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-28043.)
SSL session can be copied from one client-side connection to another
with the new SSLSession
class. TLS session resumption can
speed up the initial handshake, reduce latency and improve performance
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-19500 based on a draft by
Alex Warhawk.)
The new get_ciphers()
method can be used to
get a list of enabled ciphers in order of cipher priority.
All constants and flags have been converted to IntEnum
and
IntFlags
.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-28025.)
Server and client-side specific TLS protocols for SSLContext
were added.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-28085.)
statistics¶
A new harmonic_mean()
function has been added.
(Contributed by Steven D’Aprano in bpo-27181.)
struct¶
struct
now supports IEEE 754 half-precision floats via the 'e'
format specifier.
(Contributed by Eli Stevens, Mark Dickinson in bpo-11734.)
subprocess¶
subprocess.Popen
destructor now emits a ResourceWarning
warning
if the child process is still running. Use the context manager protocol (with
proc: ...
) or explicitly call the wait()
method to
read the exit status of the child process. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in
bpo-26741.)
The subprocess.Popen
constructor and all functions that pass arguments
through to it now accept encoding and errors arguments. Specifying either
of these will enable text mode for the stdin, stdout and stderr streams.
(Contributed by Steve Dower in bpo-6135.)
sys¶
The new getfilesystemencodeerrors()
function returns the name of
the error mode used to convert between Unicode filenames and bytes filenames.
(Contributed by Steve Dower in bpo-27781.)
On Windows the return value of the getwindowsversion()
function
now includes the platform_version field which contains the accurate major
version, minor version and build number of the current operating system,
rather than the version that is being emulated for the process
(Contributed by Steve Dower in bpo-27932.)
time¶
The struct_time
attributes tm_gmtoff
and
tm_zone
are now available on all platforms.
timeit¶
The new Timer.autorange()
convenience
method has been added to call Timer.timeit()
repeatedly so that the total run time is greater or equal to 200 milliseconds.
(Contributed by Steven D’Aprano in bpo-6422.)
timeit
now warns when there is substantial (4x) variance
between best and worst times.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-23552.)
tkinter¶
Added methods trace_add()
,
trace_remove()
and trace_info()
in the tkinter.Variable
class. They replace old methods
trace_variable()
, trace()
,
trace_vdelete()
and
trace_vinfo()
that use obsolete Tcl commands and might
not work in future versions of Tcl.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-22115).
traceback¶
Both the traceback module and the interpreter’s builtin exception display now abbreviate long sequences of repeated lines in tracebacks as shown in the following example:
>>> def f(): f()
...
>>> f()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 1, in f
File "<stdin>", line 1, in f
File "<stdin>", line 1, in f
[Previous line repeated 995 more times]
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded
(Contributed by Emanuel Barry in bpo-26823.)
tracemalloc¶
The tracemalloc
module now supports tracing memory allocations in
multiple different address spaces.
The new DomainFilter
filter class has been added
to filter block traces by their address space (domain).
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-26588.)
typing¶
Since the typing
module is provisional,
all changes introduced in Python 3.6 have also been
backported to Python 3.5.x.
The typing
module has a much improved support for generic type
aliases. For example Dict[str, Tuple[S, T]]
is now a valid
type annotation.
(Contributed by Guido van Rossum in Github #195.)
The typing.ContextManager
class has been added for
representing contextlib.AbstractContextManager
.
(Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-25609.)
The typing.Collection
class has been added for
representing collections.abc.Collection
.
(Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in bpo-27598.)
The typing.ClassVar
type construct has been added to
mark class variables. As introduced in PEP 526, a variable annotation
wrapped in ClassVar indicates that a given attribute is intended to be used as
a class variable and should not be set on instances of that class.
(Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in Github #280.)
A new TYPE_CHECKING
constant that is assumed to be
True
by the static type checkers, but is False
at runtime.
(Contributed by Guido van Rossum in Github #230.)
A new NewType()
helper function has been added to create
lightweight distinct types for annotations:
from typing import NewType
UserId = NewType('UserId', int)
some_id = UserId(524313)
The static type checker will treat the new type as if it were a subclass of the original type. (Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in Github #189.)
unicodedata¶
The unicodedata
module now uses data from Unicode 9.0.0.
(Contributed by Benjamin Peterson.)
unittest.mock¶
The Mock
class has the following improvements:
Two new methods,
Mock.assert_called()
andMock.assert_called_once()
to check if the mock object was called. (Contributed by Amit Saha in bpo-26323.)The
Mock.reset_mock()
method now has two optional keyword only arguments: return_value and side_effect. (Contributed by Kushal Das in bpo-21271.)
urllib.request¶
If a HTTP request has a file or iterable body (other than a
bytes object) but no Content-Length
header, rather than
throwing an error, AbstractHTTPHandler
now
falls back to use chunked transfer encoding.
(Contributed by Demian Brecht and Rolf Krahl in bpo-12319.)
urllib.robotparser¶
RobotFileParser
now supports the Crawl-delay
and
Request-rate
extensions.
(Contributed by Nikolay Bogoychev in bpo-16099.)
venv¶
venv
accepts a new parameter --prompt
. This parameter provides an
alternative prefix for the virtual environment. (Proposed by Łukasz Balcerzak
and ported to 3.6 by Stéphane Wirtel in bpo-22829.)
warnings¶
A new optional source parameter has been added to the
warnings.warn_explicit()
function: the destroyed object which emitted a
ResourceWarning
. A source attribute has also been added to
warnings.WarningMessage
(contributed by Victor Stinner in
bpo-26568 and bpo-26567).
When a ResourceWarning
warning is logged, the tracemalloc
module is now
used to try to retrieve the traceback where the destroyed object was allocated.
Example with the script example.py
:
import warnings
def func():
return open(__file__)
f = func()
f = None
Output of the command python3.6 -Wd -X tracemalloc=5 example.py
:
example.py:7: ResourceWarning: unclosed file <_io.TextIOWrapper name='example.py' mode='r' encoding='UTF-8'>
f = None
Object allocated at (most recent call first):
File "example.py", lineno 4
return open(__file__)
File "example.py", lineno 6
f = func()
The “Object allocated at” traceback is new and is only displayed if
tracemalloc
is tracing Python memory allocations and if the
warnings
module was already imported.
winsound¶
Allowed keyword arguments to be passed to Beep
,
MessageBeep
, and PlaySound
(bpo-27982).
xmlrpc.client¶
The xmlrpc.client
module now supports unmarshalling
additional data types used by the Apache XML-RPC implementation
for numerics and None
.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-26885.)
zipfile¶
A new ZipInfo.from_file()
class method
allows making a ZipInfo
instance from a filesystem file.
A new ZipInfo.is_dir()
method can be used
to check if the ZipInfo
instance represents a directory.
(Contributed by Thomas Kluyver in bpo-26039.)
The ZipFile.open()
method can now be used to
write data into a ZIP file, as well as for extracting data.
(Contributed by Thomas Kluyver in bpo-26039.)
zlib¶
The compress()
and decompress()
functions now accept
keyword arguments.
(Contributed by Aviv Palivoda in bpo-26243 and
Xiang Zhang in bpo-16764 respectively.)
Optimizations¶
The Python interpreter now uses a 16-bit wordcode instead of bytecode which made a number of opcode optimizations possible. (Contributed by Demur Rumed with input and reviews from Serhiy Storchaka and Victor Stinner in bpo-26647 and bpo-28050.)
The
asyncio.Future
class now has an optimized C implementation. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov and INADA Naoki in bpo-26081.)The
asyncio.Task
class now has an optimized C implementation. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-28544.)Various implementation improvements in the
typing
module (such as caching of generic types) allow up to 30 times performance improvements and reduced memory footprint.The ASCII decoder is now up to 60 times as fast for error handlers
surrogateescape
,ignore
andreplace
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-24870).The ASCII and the Latin1 encoders are now up to 3 times as fast for the error handler
surrogateescape
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25227).The UTF-8 encoder is now up to 75 times as fast for error handlers
ignore
,replace
,surrogateescape
,surrogatepass
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25267).The UTF-8 decoder is now up to 15 times as fast for error handlers
ignore
,replace
andsurrogateescape
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25301).bytes % args
is now up to 2 times faster. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25349).bytearray % args
is now between 2.5 and 5 times faster. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25399).Optimize
bytes.fromhex()
andbytearray.fromhex()
: they are now between 2x and 3.5x faster. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25401).Optimize
bytes.replace(b'', b'.')
andbytearray.replace(b'', b'.')
: up to 80% faster. (Contributed by Josh Snider in bpo-26574).Allocator functions of the
PyMem_Malloc()
domain (PYMEM_DOMAIN_MEM
) now use the pymalloc memory allocator instead ofmalloc()
function of the C library. The pymalloc allocator is optimized for objects smaller or equal to 512 bytes with a short lifetime, and usemalloc()
for larger memory blocks. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-26249).pickle.load()
andpickle.loads()
are now up to 10% faster when deserializing many small objects (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-27056).Passing keyword arguments to a function has an overhead in comparison with passing positional arguments. Now in extension functions implemented with using Argument Clinic this overhead is significantly decreased. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-27574).
Optimized
glob()
andiglob()
functions in theglob
module; they are now about 3–6 times faster. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25596).Optimized globbing in
pathlib
by usingos.scandir()
; it is now about 1.5–4 times faster. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-26032).xml.etree.ElementTree
parsing, iteration and deepcopy performance has been significantly improved. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25638, bpo-25873, and bpo-25869.)Creation of
fractions.Fraction
instances from floats and decimals is now 2 to 3 times faster. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25971.)
Build and C API Changes¶
Python now requires some C99 support in the toolchain to build. Most notably, Python now uses standard integer types and macros in place of custom macros like
PY_LONG_LONG
. For more information, see PEP 7 and bpo-17884.Cross-compiling CPython with the Android NDK and the Android API level set to 21 (Android 5.0 Lollipop) or greater runs successfully. While Android is not yet a supported platform, the Python test suite runs on the Android emulator with only about 16 tests failures. See the Android meta-issue bpo-26865.
The
--enable-optimizations
configure flag has been added. Turning it on will activate expensive optimizations like PGO. (Original patch by Alecsandru Patrascu of Intel in bpo-26359.)The GIL must now be held when allocator functions of
PYMEM_DOMAIN_OBJ
(ex:PyObject_Malloc()
) andPYMEM_DOMAIN_MEM
(ex:PyMem_Malloc()
) domains are called.New
Py_FinalizeEx()
API which indicates if flushing buffered data failed. (Contributed by Martin Panter in bpo-5319.)PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords()
now supports positional-only parameters. Positional-only parameters are defined by empty names. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-26282).PyTraceback_Print
method now abbreviates long sequences of repeated lines as"[Previous line repeated {count} more times]"
. (Contributed by Emanuel Barry in bpo-26823.)The new
PyErr_SetImportErrorSubclass()
function allows for specifying a subclass ofImportError
to raise. (Contributed by Eric Snow in bpo-15767.)The new
PyErr_ResourceWarning()
function can be used to generate aResourceWarning
providing the source of the resource allocation. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-26567.)The new
PyOS_FSPath()
function returns the file system representation of a path-like object. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-27186.)The
PyUnicode_FSConverter()
andPyUnicode_FSDecoder()
functions will now accept path-like objects.
Other Improvements¶
When
--version
(short form:-V
) is supplied twice, Python printssys.version
for detailed information.$ ./python -VV Python 3.6.0b4+ (3.6:223967b49e49+, Nov 21 2016, 20:55:04) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1)]
Deprecated¶
New Keywords¶
async
and await
are not recommended to be used as variable, class,
function or module names. Introduced by PEP 492 in Python 3.5, they will
become proper keywords in Python 3.7. Starting in Python 3.6, the use of
async
or await
as names will generate a DeprecationWarning
.
Deprecated Python behavior¶
Raising the StopIteration
exception inside a generator will now
generate a DeprecationWarning
, and will trigger a RuntimeError
in Python 3.7. See PEP 479: Change StopIteration handling inside generators for details.
The __aiter__()
method is now expected to return an asynchronous
iterator directly instead of returning an awaitable as previously.
Doing the former will trigger a DeprecationWarning
. Backward
compatibility will be removed in Python 3.7.
(Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-27243.)
A backslash-character pair that is not a valid escape sequence now generates
a DeprecationWarning
. Although this will eventually become a
SyntaxError
, that will not be for several Python releases.
(Contributed by Emanuel Barry in bpo-27364.)
When performing a relative import, falling back on __name__
and
__path__
from the calling module when __spec__
or
__package__
are not defined now raises an ImportWarning
.
(Contributed by Rose Ames in bpo-25791.)
Deprecated Python modules, functions and methods¶
asynchat¶
The asynchat
has been deprecated in favor of asyncio
.
(Contributed by Mariatta in bpo-25002.)
asyncore¶
The asyncore
has been deprecated in favor of asyncio
.
(Contributed by Mariatta in bpo-25002.)
dbm¶
Unlike other dbm
implementations, the dbm.dumb
module
creates databases with the 'rw'
mode and allows modifying the database
opened with the 'r'
mode. This behavior is now deprecated and will
be removed in 3.8.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-21708.)
distutils¶
The undocumented extra_path
argument to the
Distribution
constructor is now considered deprecated
and will raise a warning if set. Support for this parameter will be
removed in a future Python release. See bpo-27919 for details.
grp¶
The support of non-integer arguments in getgrgid()
has been
deprecated.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-26129.)
importlib¶
The importlib.machinery.SourceFileLoader.load_module()
and
importlib.machinery.SourcelessFileLoader.load_module()
methods
are now deprecated. They were the only remaining implementations of
importlib.abc.Loader.load_module()
in importlib
that had not
been deprecated in previous versions of Python in favour of
importlib.abc.Loader.exec_module()
.
The importlib.machinery.WindowsRegistryFinder
class is now
deprecated. As of 3.6.0, it is still added to sys.meta_path
by
default (on Windows), but this may change in future releases.
os¶
Undocumented support of general bytes-like objects
as paths in os
functions, compile()
and similar functions is
now deprecated.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25791 and bpo-26754.)
re¶
Support for inline flags (?letters)
in the middle of the regular
expression has been deprecated and will be removed in a future Python
version. Flags at the start of a regular expression are still allowed.
(Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-22493.)
ssl¶
OpenSSL 0.9.8, 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 are deprecated and no longer supported.
In the future the ssl
module will require at least OpenSSL 1.0.2 or
1.1.0.
SSL-related arguments like certfile
, keyfile
and check_hostname
in ftplib
, http.client
, imaplib
, poplib
,
and smtplib
have been deprecated in favor of context
.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-28022.)
A couple of protocols and functions of the ssl
module are now
deprecated. Some features will no longer be available in future versions
of OpenSSL. Other features are deprecated in favor of a different API.
(Contributed by Christian Heimes in bpo-28022 and bpo-26470.)
tkinter¶
The tkinter.tix
module is now deprecated. tkinter
users
should use tkinter.ttk
instead.
Deprecated functions and types of the C API¶
Undocumented functions PyUnicode_AsEncodedObject()
,
PyUnicode_AsDecodedObject()
, PyUnicode_AsEncodedUnicode()
and PyUnicode_AsDecodedUnicode()
are deprecated now.
Use the generic codec based API instead.
Deprecated Build Options¶
The --with-system-ffi
configure flag is now on by default on non-macOS
UNIX platforms. It may be disabled by using --without-system-ffi
, but
using the flag is deprecated and will not be accepted in Python 3.7.
macOS is unaffected by this change. Note that many OS distributors already
use the --with-system-ffi
flag when building their system Python.
Removed¶
API and Feature Removals¶
Unknown escapes consisting of
'\'
and an ASCII letter in regular expressions will now cause an error. In replacement templates forre.sub()
they are still allowed, but deprecated. There.LOCALE
flag can now only be used with binary patterns.inspect.getmoduleinfo()
was removed (was deprecated since CPython 3.3).inspect.getmodulename()
should be used for obtaining the module name for a given path. (Contributed by Yury Selivanov in bpo-13248.)traceback.Ignore
class andtraceback.usage
,traceback.modname
,traceback.fullmodname
,traceback.find_lines_from_code
,traceback.find_lines
,traceback.find_strings
,traceback.find_executable_lines
methods were removed from thetraceback
module. They were undocumented methods deprecated since Python 3.2 and equivalent functionality is available from private methods.The
tk_menuBar()
andtk_bindForTraversal()
dummy methods intkinter
widget classes were removed (corresponding Tk commands were obsolete since Tk 4.0).The
open()
method of thezipfile.ZipFile
class no longer supports the'U'
mode (was deprecated since Python 3.4). Useio.TextIOWrapper
for reading compressed text files in universal newlines mode.The undocumented
IN
,CDROM
,DLFCN
,TYPES
,CDIO
, andSTROPTS
modules have been removed. They had been available in the platform specificLib/plat-*/
directories, but were chronically out of date, inconsistently available across platforms, and unmaintained. The script that created these modules is still available in the source distribution at Tools/scripts/h2py.py.The deprecated
asynchat.fifo
class has been removed.
Porting to Python 3.6¶
This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes that may require changes to your code.
Changes in ‘python’ Command Behavior¶
The output of a special Python build with defined
COUNT_ALLOCS
,SHOW_ALLOC_COUNT
orSHOW_TRACK_COUNT
macros is now off by default. It can be re-enabled using the-X showalloccount
option. It now outputs tostderr
instead ofstdout
. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-23034.)
Changes in the Python API¶
open()
will no longer allow combining the'U'
mode flag with'+'
. (Contributed by Jeff Balogh and John O’Connor in bpo-2091.)sqlite3
no longer implicitly commits an open transaction before DDL statements.On Linux,
os.urandom()
now blocks until the system urandom entropy pool is initialized to increase the security.When
importlib.abc.Loader.exec_module()
is defined,importlib.abc.Loader.create_module()
must also be defined.PyErr_SetImportError()
now setsTypeError
when its msg argument is not set. Previously onlyNULL
was returned.The format of the
co_lnotab
attribute of code objects changed to support a negative line number delta. By default, Python does not emit bytecode with a negative line number delta. Functions usingframe.f_lineno
,PyFrame_GetLineNumber()
orPyCode_Addr2Line()
are not affected. Functions directly decodingco_lnotab
should be updated to use a signed 8-bit integer type for the line number delta, but this is only required to support applications using a negative line number delta. SeeObjects/lnotab_notes.txt
for theco_lnotab
format and how to decode it, and see the PEP 511 for the rationale.The functions in the
compileall
module now return booleans instead of1
or0
to represent success or failure, respectively. Thanks to booleans being a subclass of integers, this should only be an issue if you were doing identity checks for1
or0
. See bpo-25768.Reading the
port
attribute ofurllib.parse.urlsplit()
andurlparse()
results now raisesValueError
for out-of-range values, rather than returningNone
. See bpo-20059.The
imp
module now raises aDeprecationWarning
instead ofPendingDeprecationWarning
.The following modules have had missing APIs added to their
__all__
attributes to match the documented APIs:calendar
,cgi
,csv
,ElementTree
,enum
,fileinput
,ftplib
,logging
,mailbox
,mimetypes
,optparse
,plistlib
,smtpd
,subprocess
,tarfile
,threading
andwave
. This means they will export new symbols whenimport *
is used. (Contributed by Joel Taddei and Jacek Kołodziej in bpo-23883.)When performing a relative import, if
__package__
does not compare equal to__spec__.parent
thenImportWarning
is raised. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-25791.)When a relative import is performed and no parent package is known, then
ImportError
will be raised. Previously,SystemError
could be raised. (Contributed by Brett Cannon in bpo-18018.)Servers based on the
socketserver
module, including those defined inhttp.server
,xmlrpc.server
andwsgiref.simple_server
, now only catch exceptions derived fromException
. Therefore if a request handler raises an exception likeSystemExit
orKeyboardInterrupt
,handle_error()
is no longer called, and the exception will stop a single-threaded server. (Contributed by Martin Panter in bpo-23430.)spwd.getspnam()
now raises aPermissionError
instead ofKeyError
if the user doesn’t have privileges.The
socket.socket.close()
method now raises an exception if an error (e.g.EBADF
) was reported by the underlying system call. (Contributed by Martin Panter in bpo-26685.)The decode_data argument for the
smtpd.SMTPChannel
andsmtpd.SMTPServer
constructors is nowFalse
by default. This means that the argument passed toprocess_message()
is now a bytes object by default, andprocess_message()
will be passed keyword arguments. Code that has already been updated in accordance with the deprecation warning generated by 3.5 will not be affected.All optional arguments of the
dump()
,dumps()
,load()
andloads()
functions andJSONEncoder
andJSONDecoder
class constructors in thejson
module are now keyword-only. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-18726.)Subclasses of
type
which don’t overridetype.__new__
may no longer use the one-argument form to get the type of an object.As part of PEP 487, the handling of keyword arguments passed to
type
(other than the metaclass hint,metaclass
) is now consistently delegated toobject.__init_subclass__()
. This means thattype.__new__()
andtype.__init__()
both now accept arbitrary keyword arguments, butobject.__init_subclass__()
(which is called fromtype.__new__()
) will reject them by default. Custom metaclasses accepting additional keyword arguments will need to adjust their calls totype.__new__()
(whether direct or viasuper
) accordingly.In
distutils.command.sdist.sdist
, thedefault_format
attribute has been removed and is no longer honored. Instead, the gzipped tarfile format is the default on all platforms and no platform-specific selection is made. In environments where distributions are built on Windows and zip distributions are required, configure the project with asetup.cfg
file containing the following:[sdist] formats=zip
This behavior has also been backported to earlier Python versions by Setuptools 26.0.0.
In the
urllib.request
module and thehttp.client.HTTPConnection.request()
method, if no Content-Length header field has been specified and the request body is a file object, it is now sent with HTTP 1.1 chunked encoding. If a file object has to be sent to a HTTP 1.0 server, the Content-Length value now has to be specified by the caller. (Contributed by Demian Brecht and Rolf Krahl with tweaks from Martin Panter in bpo-12319.)The
DictReader
now returns rows of typeOrderedDict
. (Contributed by Steve Holden in bpo-27842.)The
crypt.METHOD_CRYPT
will no longer be added tocrypt.methods
if unsupported by the platform. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-25287.)The verbose and rename arguments for
namedtuple()
are now keyword-only. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger in bpo-25628.)On Linux,
ctypes.util.find_library()
now looks inLD_LIBRARY_PATH
for shared libraries. (Contributed by Vinay Sajip in bpo-9998.)The
imaplib.IMAP4
class now handles flags containing the']'
character in messages sent from the server to improve real-world compatibility. (Contributed by Lita Cho in bpo-21815.)The
mmap.write()
function now returns the number of bytes written like other write methods. (Contributed by Jakub Stasiak in bpo-26335.)The
pkgutil.iter_modules()
andpkgutil.walk_packages()
functions now returnModuleInfo
named tuples. (Contributed by Ramchandra Apte in bpo-17211.)re.sub()
now raises an error for invalid numerical group references in replacement templates even if the pattern is not found in the string. The error message for invalid group references now includes the group index and the position of the reference. (Contributed by SilentGhost, Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-25953.)zipfile.ZipFile
will now raiseNotImplementedError
for unrecognized compression values. Previously a plainRuntimeError
was raised. Additionally, callingZipFile
methods on a closed ZipFile or calling thewrite()
method on a ZipFile created with mode'r'
will raise aValueError
. Previously, aRuntimeError
was raised in those scenarios.when custom metaclasses are combined with zero-argument
super()
or direct references from methods to the implicit__class__
closure variable, the implicit__classcell__
namespace entry must now be passed up totype.__new__
for initialisation. Failing to do so will result in aDeprecationWarning
in Python 3.6 and aRuntimeError
in Python 3.8.With the introduction of
ModuleNotFoundError
, import system consumers may start expecting import system replacements to raise that more specific exception when appropriate, rather than the less-specificImportError
. To provide future compatibility with such consumers, implementors of alternative import systems that completely replace__import__()
will need to update their implementations to raise the new subclass when a module can’t be found at all. Implementors of compliant plugins to the default import system shouldn’t need to make any changes, as the default import system will raise the new subclass when appropriate.
Changes in the C API¶
The
PyMem_Malloc()
allocator family now uses the pymalloc allocator rather than the systemmalloc()
. Applications callingPyMem_Malloc()
without holding the GIL can now crash. Set thePYTHONMALLOC
environment variable todebug
to validate the usage of memory allocators in your application. See bpo-26249.Py_Exit()
(and the main interpreter) now override the exit status with 120 if flushing buffered data failed. See bpo-5319.
CPython bytecode changes¶
There have been several major changes to the bytecode in Python 3.6.
The Python interpreter now uses a 16-bit wordcode instead of bytecode. (Contributed by Demur Rumed with input and reviews from Serhiy Storchaka and Victor Stinner in bpo-26647 and bpo-28050.)
The new
FORMAT_VALUE
andBUILD_STRING
opcodes as part of the formatted string literal implementation. (Contributed by Eric Smith in bpo-25483 and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-27078.)The new
BUILD_CONST_KEY_MAP
opcode to optimize the creation of dictionaries with constant keys. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-27140.)The function call opcodes have been heavily reworked for better performance and simpler implementation. The
MAKE_FUNCTION
,CALL_FUNCTION
,CALL_FUNCTION_KW
andBUILD_MAP_UNPACK_WITH_CALL
opcodes have been modified, the newCALL_FUNCTION_EX
andBUILD_TUPLE_UNPACK_WITH_CALL
have been added, andCALL_FUNCTION_VAR
,CALL_FUNCTION_VAR_KW
andMAKE_CLOSURE
opcodes have been removed. (Contributed by Demur Rumed in bpo-27095, and Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-27213, bpo-28257.)The new
SETUP_ANNOTATIONS
andSTORE_ANNOTATION
opcodes have been added to support the new variable annotation syntax. (Contributed by Ivan Levkivskyi in bpo-27985.)
Notable changes in Python 3.6.2¶
New make regen-all
build target¶
To simplify cross-compilation, and to ensure that CPython can reliably be compiled without requiring an existing version of Python to already be available, the autotools-based build system no longer attempts to implicitly recompile generated files based on file modification times.
Instead, a new make regen-all
command has been added to force regeneration
of these files when desired (e.g. after an initial version of Python has
already been built based on the pregenerated versions).
More selective regeneration targets are also defined - see Makefile.pre.in for details.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-23404.)
New in version 3.6.2.
Removal of make touch
build target¶
The make touch
build target previously used to request implicit regeneration
of generated files by updating their modification times has been removed.
It has been replaced by the new make regen-all
target.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-23404.)
Changed in version 3.6.2.
Notable changes in Python 3.6.4¶
The PyExc_RecursionErrorInst
singleton that was part of the public API
has been removed as its members being never cleared may cause a segfault
during finalization of the interpreter.
(Contributed by Xavier de Gaye in bpo-22898 and bpo-30697.)
Notable changes in Python 3.6.5¶
The locale.localeconv()
function now sets temporarily the LC_CTYPE
locale to the LC_NUMERIC
locale in some cases.
(Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-31900.)