The Python development team has announced the arrival of 3.14’s first release candidate before its official launch in October.
This release, designated 3.14.0rc1, represents the penultimate preview of the next major version. With the release candidate phase now underway, the core team will be locking down the codebase.
From this point forward, only reviewed bug fixes will be merged, ensuring stability for the final release. The application binary interface (ABI) is now frozen for the entire 3.14 series, which means any binary wheels compiled against this release candidate will be compatible with the final version.
The development schedule indicates that a second and final release candidate, 3.14.0rc2, is planned for 26 August 2025. This will be the last opportunity for widespread testing before the official public release of Python 3.14.0, which is slated for 7 October 2025.
In their announcement, the team issued an encouragement for maintainers of third-party Python projects to begin their compatibility testing. The goal is for the ecosystem to be fully prepared for the new version, allowing developers to upgrade smoothly.
The Python development team urges maintainers to publish 3.14 compatible wheels to the Python Package Index (PyPI) to support this process. While this release is as close to final as possible, it is still considered a preview and is not recommended for production environments.
Perhaps the biggest feature arriving in Python 3.14 is the official support for a free-threaded CPython. Outlined in PEP 779, this change removes the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) for many workloads, enabling true parallel execution of Python code on multiple cores without requiring multiprocessing. This has been a long-awaited feature and promises substantial performance improvements for concurrent applications.
Performance enhancements do not stop there. Python 3.14 will also introduce an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the official macOS and Windows builds, which could provide speed boosts for certain types of code. This feature is opt-in for now and requires building from source.
PEP 734, meanwhile, officially brings support for multiple interpreters within the standard library. This opens up new possibilities for isolation and concurrency within a single process.
Developer experience has also been a major focus. PEP 750 introduces template string literals, or t-strings, which provide the familiar, powerful syntax of f-strings for custom string processing.
Another syntax refinement in Python 3.14 comes from PEP 758, which allows except and except* expressions to be written without brackets, tidying up error handling code. The interactive REPL now features syntax highlighting, and several command-line tools including unittest, argparse, json, and calendar have gained support for colour output to improve readability.
The standard library sees several valuable additions. PEP 784 adds the compression.zstd module, providing native support for the high-performance Zstandard compression algorithm. The uuid module has been updated to support UUID versions 6, 7, and 8, while generation for versions 3 to 5 is now up to 40% faster. Security is also enhanced with a new builtin implementation of HMAC that uses formally verified code from the HACL* project.
On the tooling and API front, PEP 768 specifies a zero-overhead external debugger interface for CPython, and the pdb module now supports attaching remotely to a running Python process. These changes promise to make debugging complex applications much more manageable. The C API for configuring Python has also been improved under PEP 741.
To modernise its distribution and security practices, the Python Software Foundation will no longer provide PGP signatures for release artefacts starting with 3.14. As detailed in PEP 761, developers and distributors are now encouraged to use Sigstore for verification.
For Windows users, the traditional MSI installer is being phased out in favour of a new install manager, available from the Windows Store or its dedicated download page. The old installer will remain available through the 3.14 and 3.15 release cycles to ease the transition.
The release announcement, penned by the team from Helsinki following EuroPython, also noted a fun coincidence. The release candidate arrived on 22 July, celebrated by mathematicians as Pi Approximation Day, because the fraction 22/7 is a well-known approximation of π.
As Python 3.14 moves closer to its final form, the focus for core developers now shifts towards ensuring all the new features are thoroughly documented and reflected in the “What’s New” guide.
(Photo by Angiola Harry)
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