What’s new in Python 3.16

Editor:

TBD

This article explains the new features in Python 3.16, compared to 3.15.

For full details, see the changelog.

Note

Prerelease users should be aware that this document is currently in draft form. It will be updated substantially as Python 3.16 moves towards release, so it’s worth checking back even after reading earlier versions.

Summary — release highlights

New features

Other language changes

New modules

  • None yet.

Improved modules

xml

  • Add support of multiple multi-byte encodings in the XML parser: “cp932”, “cp949”, “cp950”, “Big5”,”EUC-JP”, “GB2312”, “GBK”, “johab”, and “Shift_JIS”. Add partial support (only BMP characters) for multi-byte encodings “Big5-HKSCS”, “EUC_JIS-2004”, “EUC_JISX0213”, “Shift_JIS-2004”, “Shift_JISX0213”, “utf-8-sig” and non-standard aliases like “UTF8” (without hyphen). The parser now raises ValueError for known unsupported multi-byte encodings such us “ISO-2022-JP” or “raw-unicode-escape” instead of failing later, when encounter non-ASCII data. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in gh-62259.)

Optimizations

module_name

  • TODO

Removed

annotationlib

asyncio

functools

  • Calling the Python implementation of functools.reduce() with function or sequence as keyword arguments has been deprecated since Python 3.14.

logging

  • Support for custom logging handlers with the strm argument is deprecated and scheduled for removal in Python 3.16. Define handlers with the stream argument instead.

mimetypes

symtable

  • The symtable.Class.get_methods() method which has been deprecated since Python 3.14.

sys

  • The _enablelegacywindowsfsencoding() function which has been deprecated since Python 3.13. Use the PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSFSENCODING environment variable instead. (Contributed by Stan Ulbrych in gh-149595.)

sysconfig

  • The sysconfig.expand_makefile_vars() function which has been deprecated since Python 3.14. Use the vars argument of sysconfig.get_paths() instead.

tarfile

  • The undocumented and unused tarfile.TarFile.tarfile attribute has been deprecated since Python 3.13.

Deprecated

  • module_name: TODO

Porting to Python 3.16

This section lists previously described changes and other bugfixes that may require changes to your code.

Build changes

  • Remove the bundled copy of the libmpdec decimal library from the CPython source tree to simplify maintenence and updates. The decimal module will now unconditionally use the system’s libmpdec decimal library. Also remove the now unused --with-system-libmpdec configure flag. This change has no impact on binary releases of Python, which have been built against a separate copy of libmpdec for the past several releases.

    (Contributed by Sergey B Kirpichev in gh-115119.)

C API changes

New features

  • TODO

Porting to Python 3.16

  • TODO

Deprecated C APIs

  • TODO

Removed C APIs