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Python 3.4 Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

New submitter gadfium writes: "Python 3.4 has been released. It adds new library features, bug fixes, and security improvements. It includes: at standardized implementation of enumeration types, a statistics module, improvements to object finalization, a more secure and interchangeable hash algorithm for strings and binary data, asynchronous I/O support, and an installer for the pip package manager."

3 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. and... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And everyone will keep using 2.6/2.7, the windows XP of python.

    1. Re: and... by dmbasso · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are plenty of good reasons to use Python 3, it is way more elegant and consistent. The way text and binary data is dealt with is incomparably better. I doubt that anyone who ever had done any serious coding in Python 2 escaped from the mindfuckery of mixing unicode and ascii.

      The problem for a wider acceptance continues to be the libraries... for instance, Twisted. It is good that there is an async module in the standard library now, but too bad that my code already relies heavily on Twisted.

      And about the GIL: if you are complaining about it, you most probably are not using the right language for the job.

      --
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  2. Re:And it still has the GIL by steveha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You make it sound as if it were no big deal to remove the GIL. It has been tried, and Python got 2x slower, so that attempt was abandoned. Python 3.2 gained a different implementation of the GIL, and that fixed some problems, but other problems still occur.

    The GIL is Python's hardest problem.

    https://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2012/03/31/pythons-hardest-problem/

    https://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/06/30/pythons-hardest-problem-revisited/

    As noted in the above referenced blog, you can use Jython or IronPython to avoid the GIL; PyPy will be using Software Transactional Memory to avoid the GIL; and you can use the multiprocessing module to use multiple cores without GIL problems. You do have options other than just using CPython.

    If removing the GIL was as easy as you seem to think, it would be gone now, at least in a fork of CPython. Yet still it remains.

    --
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