Release date: Feb. 6, 2024

This is the eighth maintenance release of Python 3.11

Python 3.11.8 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.11 are:

General changes

• PEP 657 -- Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 -- Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 680 -- tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• gh-90908 -- Introduce task groups to asyncio
• gh-34627 -- Atomic grouping ((?>...)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster CPython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

Typing and typing language changes

• PEP 673 -- Self Type
• PEP 646 -- Variadic Generics
• PEP 675 -- Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 -- Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• PEP 681 -- Data Class Transforms

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues.
• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

In general relativity, a white hole is a hypothetical region of spacetime and singularity that cannot be entered from the outside, although energy-matter, light and information can escape from it. In this sense, it is the reverse of a black hole, from which energy-matter, light and information cannot escape. White holes appear in the theory of eternal black holes. In addition to a black hole region in the future, such a solution of the Einstein field equations has a white hole region in its past. This region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, however, nor are there any observed physical processes through which a white hole could be formed.

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