A new beta of Python 3.5 arrived today. Beta 4 of the next revision of the popular programming language adds only four bug fixes, while 3.5 itself is a few months from completion.
The primary changes between 3.4 and 3.5 are the inclusion of a new matrix multiplication operator and co-routines with Await and Async syntax. Those latter features will help to speed up Python for applications that use non-blocking I/O.
More features are currently in the works than have been added to the change list.
One such change not on the change-list yet is Guido van Rossum’s implementation of Type Hints. As van Rossum wrote in his Python Enhancement Proposal, numbered 0484, the goal of Type Hints is, “to provide a standard syntax for type annotations, opening up Python code to easier static analysis and refactoring, potential runtime type checking, and (perhaps, in some contexts) code generation utilizing type information.”
Of the project’s goals, wrote van Rossum, improving, “static analysis is the most important. This includes support for off-line type checkers such as mypy, as well as providing a standard notation that can be used by IDEs for code completion and refactoring.”
Other improvements in 3.5 include many performance gains and optimizations. The function os.listdir() has been replaced with os.scandir() to speed up access to the file system, while the new Async and Await features should improve performance when dealing with incoming and outgoing information.
Python version 3.5 is still a few months away release, but the new beta of 3.5 can be downloaded here.
