What's New in Python 3.13 (Overview)
Python 3.13 published on October 7, 2024. This new version is a major step forward for the language, although several of the biggest changes are happening under the hood and won’t be immediately visible to you.
In a sense, Python 3.13 is laying the groundwork for some future improvements, especially to the language’s performance. As you watch the course, you’ll learn more about the background for this and dive into some new features that are fully available now.
In this video course, you’ll learn about some of the improvements in the new version, including:
- Improvements made to the interactive interpreter (REPL)
- Clearer error messages that can help you fix common mistakes
- Advancements done in removing the global interpreter lock (GIL) and making Python free-threaded
- The implementation of an experimental JIT-compiler
- A host of minor upgrades to Python’s static type system
In this video course, you’ll explore these changes and see how this new version of Python can work for you.
If you want to try any of the examples in this video course, then you’ll need to use Python 3.13. The Python 3 Installation & Setup Guide and How Can You Install a Pre-Release Version of Python? walk you through several options for adding a new version of Python to your system.
00:00 Welcome to What’s New in Python 3.13. My name is Christopher, and I will be your guide. Python is on a yearly release schedule and the 2024 release is Python 3.13.
00:13 There’s actually a PEP out there to match the version number with the year, but it hasn’t been approved yet so for now, the release is year minus 11. Like all releases, this one is stacked with improvements, including the one, which is probably my favorite, the new REPL.
00:28 There’s also two performance improvement experiments sort of included, I say sort of because they’re not there by default, more on that in a lesson later.
00:38
And what would a release be without new ways of doing typing? There are four new key additions to the typing system to learn about. Both the copy and pathlib modules have had some improvements and there’s lots of other bits and pieces along the way as well. So that you can see this video as close to the release date as possible, I made it using Release Candidate 2 as release candidates are pretty close to the real thing, this shouldn’t impact anything substantial. Let’s not dally, let’s dive right in.
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