Python Versions

(Note: This page is updated every now and then, according to new Python releases and other interesting details. Last updated: 2025-11-09)

Even though I’ve used Python programming language on-and-off since about year 2000, I only started paying more attention to specific Python versions around 2016 when I gradually started using Python more seriously in devops. When dealing with different runtime environments it is crucial to know which features are available in which Python versions. This page lists the most important features and changes in Python versions for me, to be constantly updated when need arises.

This list below is merely a short sample of all the important or interesting changes in the Python versions. Be sure to check the linked full “What’s New” pages when planning your own workflows and deployments.

Note that I haven’t included any performance improvements in this list since it’s expected that newer Python releases are faster than previous ones anyway, as drafted out by Mark Shannon in Faster CPython plan.

Python 3.15 (to be released on 2026-10)

• What’s New In Python 3.15 (draft)
• Will have explicit lazy imports (PEP 810)
• Will use UTF-8 as the default encoding, independent of the system’s environment
• Will remove deprecated pathlib.PurePath.is_reserved()
• The undocumented keyword argument syntax for creating NamedTuple classes (for example, Point = NamedTuple("Point", x=int, y=int)) will no longer be supported
• (to be updated while waiting for the release)

Python 3.14 (released on 2025-10-07)

• What’s New In Python 3.14
• Python 3.14 is currently the latest Python version generally available in AWS Lambda (see Lambda runtimes)
• Template strings (t-strings) (PEP 750)
• Allow except and except* without parentheses (PEP 758)
• uuid.uuid6(), uuid.uuid7(), uuid.uuid8()
• compression package and compression.zstd module

Python 3.13 (released on 2024-10-07)

• What’s New In Python 3.13
• Python 3.13 is the packaged Python in Debian 13 Trixie
• Python 3.13 is currently the latest Python version generally available in Azure Functions (see Azure Functions runtime versions overview)
• Added deprecated argument in argparse.ArgumentParser.add_argument()
• base64.z85encode() and .z85decode()
• ipaddress.IPv4Address.ipv6_mapped property
• pathlib.Path.from_uri()
• Improved resolution of time.monotonic() and time.time() on Windows
• Soft deprecated getopt and optparse modules
• Deprecated positional arguments maxsplit, count and flags in re.split(), re.sub() and re.subn(), they will become keyword-only
• Deprecated pathlib.PurePath.is_reserved() (to be removed in Python 3.15)
• Removed “dead batteries“

Python 3.12 (released on 2023-10-02)

• What’s New In Python 3.12
• Python 3.12 is available packaged in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (noble)
• itertools.batched()
• pathlib.Path.walk()
• Removed distutils module
• Removed many deprecated unittest.TestCase method aliases
• Removed some deprecated configparser names
• Deprecated datetime.datetime.utcnow() and datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp()
• Deprecated sqlite3 default adapters and converters

Python 3.11 (released on 2022-10-24)

• What’s New In Python 3.11
• Python 3.11 is the packaged Python in Debian 12 Bookworm
• Exception groups and except*
• Exceptions can have added notes
• TOML configuration file parser: tomllib module
• asyncio.TaskGroup
• typing.Self, typing.LiteralString
• enum.StrEnum, enum.show_flag_values()
• Deprecated a few legacy modules (to be removed in Python 3.13)
• Deprecated typing.Text (removal schedule not yet specified)

Python 3.10 (released on 2021-10-04, end of life expected on 2026-10)

• What’s New In Python 3.10
• Python 3.10 is available packaged in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy)
• Allow writing union types as X | Y
• Structural pattern matching (match–case statements)
• typing.TypeAlias
• socket.timeout is now an alias of TimeoutError
• bisect module functions now have key parameter
• Deprecated distutils module (to be removed in Python 3.12)

Python 3.9 (released on 2020-10-05, end of life since 2025-10-31)

• What’s New In Python 3.9
• Python 3.9 is the packaged Python in Debian 11 Bullseye
• Python 3.9 is available packaged in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal)
• Dictionary merge and update operators (| and |=)
• Using built-in types (like dict and list) in type hinting
• zoneinfo module
• str.removeprefix() and str.removesuffix()
• ipaddress.IPv6Address supports IPv6 scoped addresses

Python 3.8 (released on 2019-10-14, end of life since 2024-10-07)

• What’s New In Python 3.8
• Python 3.8 is available packaged in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal)
• Walrus operator (:=, assignment expressions)
• Positional-only parameters
• typing.Final, typing.final, typing.Literal

Python 3.7 (released on 2018-06-27, end of life since 2023-06-27)

• What’s New In Python 3.7
• Python 3.7 is the packaged Python in Debian 10 Buster
• Python 3.7 was available packaged in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (bionic)
• Dictionary item ordering is preserved
• dataclasses module
• ipaddress.IPv4Network.subnet_of(), .supernet_of() (and the same for ipaddress.IPv6Network)

Python 3.6 (released on 2016-12-23, end of life since 2021-12-23)

• What’s New In Python 3.6
• Python 3.6 was available packaged in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (bionic)
• f-strings (formatted string literals)
• Underscores in numeric literals (for grouping digits)
• secrets module
• enum.auto

See also:

• What’s New In Python (for even older Python versions)
• Status of Python Versions
• Python in Debian