Python 3.13 Alpha Kicks Off The Cycle With New Deprecations

While Python 3.12 was just released earlier this month, already the first alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for early-stage testing and evaluation.

Python 3.13 Alpha 1 is just the first of seven planned alpha releases during which active feature development is continuing. Feature work is going to continue through early May, so this is just the very early start with many new features still being drafted. We can expect more performance improvements with Python 3.13.

As for what's happened so far with Python 3.13, much of the early changes revolve around new deprecations of features to be dropped for Python 3.15~3.16. The undocumented ctypes.SetPointerType() and ctypes.ARRAY() functions are being removed, the getopt and optparse modules are soft-deprecated, and the http.server.CGIHTTPRequestHandler also now emits a deprecation warning.

Some of the additions so far with Python 3.13 include allowing the count argument with str.replace() to be a keyword, stripping indents from docstrings, ast.parse() now accepts an optional "optimize" argument to obtain an optimized AST, a new copy.replace() function, the os.process_cpu_count() function will return the number of logical CPUs usable by the calling thread of the current process, a low-level interface for Linux's timer notification file descriptors, and the textwrap.indent() function is now around 30% faster for large inputs. More details on the early Python 3.13 changes can be found via the work-in-progress 3.13 release notes.

Downloads and more details on the initial Python 3.13 alpha candidate via the Python Insider blog.