Beta testing begins for Python 3.3.0

Python 3.3.0 has entered its beta testing phase, just under four months after the first alpha version was released. Since then another three alpha releases have been made; the beta release marks the latest stage on a roadmap which should see the final version of 3.3.0 released on 26 August. Changes in the beta release are predominantly bug fixes or clarifications or corrections of behaviour. Python 3.3.0 will be the first release of Python since the Python Language Moratorium expired, and it includes new syntax for delegating work to a subgenerator and __qualname__ for getting a fully qualified name for objects and classes.

Other changes include support for PEP 405 (Python Virtual Environments for lightweight virtual Python instances similar to virtualenv), a new implementation of memoryview, flexible string representation for space-efficient common cases, and a reworked exception hierarchy for IO and OS exceptions. There is also a new policy framework for the email package and new APIs which expose the mechanisms that make up the import command. Explicit Unicode literals from Python 2 have also reappeared to make some porting from Python 2 to Python 3 easier. Among the new modules, ipaddress makes it easier to manipulate IP addresses and faulthandler assists when diagnosing crashes.

Full details of the changes are available in What's New in Python 3.3. The NEWS file carries even more detail about the fixes and adjustments made between the alpha and beta revisions. Python 3.3.0 beta 1 is available to download as source code, as a Windows installer and as a Mac OS X installer.

The beta release is intended for testing and feedback and not for production use. Stable, non-testing releases of Python 3.2.3 and 2.7.3 are available from the Python.org stable release download page.

(djwm)