From the ‘Slithering Perfection’ files:
The latest major milestone release of the open source Python programming language debuted this week, providing developers with incremental new features and capabilities.
The new Python 3.4 release is the first big Python milestone since the Python 3.3 release debuted in October of 2012. Python 3.3 was defined by its improved virtualization capabilities. In contrast, Python 3.4 offers developers a little bit of everything.
The big feature that I noticed is the ‘asyncio’ which provides Asynchronous IO support which is critical in any modern language. Given the important that Python has to cloud developers – it is after all the language of OpenStack – I suspect asyncio could be an extremely beneficial new technology in Python.
Other major new features added in Python 3.4 include:
- PEP 428, a “pathlib” module providing object-oriented filesystem paths
- PEP 435, a standardized “enum” module
- PEP 436, a build enhancement that will help generate introspection information for builtins
- PEP 442, improved semantics for object finalization
- PEP 443, adding single-dispatch generic functions to the standard library
- PEP 445, a new C API for implementing custom memory allocators
- PEP 446, changing file descriptors to not be inherited by default in subprocesses
- PEP 450, a new “statistics” module
- PEP 451, standardizing module metadata for Python’s module import system
- PEP 453, a bundled installer for the pip package manager
- PEP 454, a new “tracemalloc” module for tracing Python memory allocations
- PEP 456, a new hash algorithm for Python strings and binary data
- PEP 3154, a new and improved protocol for pickled objects
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
