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It’s time for the last beta release of Python 3.8. Go find it at:

This release is the last of four planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release. The next pre-release of Python 3.8 will be 3.8.0rc1, the first release candidate, currently scheduled for 2019-09-30.

Call to action

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.8 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. Please note this is the last beta release, there is not much time left to identify and fix issues before the release of 3.8.0. If you were hesitating trying it out before, now is the time.

While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (2019-09-30). Our goal is have no ABI changes after beta 3 and no code changes after 3.8.0rc1, the release candidate.

To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.8 as possible during the beta phase. That beta phase is coming to an end. Please test now.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.

Acknowledgments

Many developers worked hard for the past four weeks to squash remaining bugs, some requiring non-obvious decisions. Many thanks to the most active, namely Raymond Hettinger, Steve Dower, Victor Stinner, Terry Jan Reedy, Serhiy Storchaka, Pablo Galindo Salgado, Tal Einat, Zackery Spytz, Ronald Oussoren, Neil Schemenauer, Inada Naoki, Christian Heimes, and Andrew Svetlov.

3.8.0 would not reach the Last Beta without you. Thank you!

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Is it worth posting this in the Users category as well? I assume that not everyone is tracking Committers (and may have muted it, just like I’ve muted Users :slight_smile: )

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Nit: In the text above you call the release candidate c1, in the past we’ve called these rc1. No idea if any tooling would balk at the difference if you go with the c name instead of rc name. Or if you merely made a typo. They both sort properly semver wise.

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Truth, I missed that we were calling them “rc” before and it was natural to go a->b->c. Will fix.