What’s that? The last alpha release? Just one more month until feature freeze! Get your features done, get your bugs fixed, let’s get 3.13.0 ready for people to actually use! Until then, let’s test with alpha 6. The highlights of 3.13 you ask? Well:

• In the interactive interpreter, exception tracebacks are now colorized by default.
• A preliminary, experimental JIT was added, providing the ground work for significant performance improvements.
• The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental, which should mean shorter pauses for collection in programs with a lot of objects.
• Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files. (Most tools handling docstrings already strip leading indentation.)
• The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
• PEP 594 (Removing dead batteries from the standard library) scheduled removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.
• Many other removals of deprecated classes, functions and methods in various standard library modules.
• New deprecations, most of which are scheduled for removal from Python 3.15 or 3.16.
• C API removals and deprecations. (Some removals present in alpha 1 were reverted in alpha 2, as the removals were deemed too disruptive at this time.)

(Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Thomas know. It’s getting to be really important now!)