Introduction The upcoming Python 3.14 release is packed with exciting features and improvements. A release candidate for 3.14 is now available. Regular Python users are encouraged to download and try it to ensure it is well tested before the final release. It contains significant improvements to the free-threaded version of Python, which allows Python to run without the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Here at Quansight, I have implemented several optimizations to the garbage collector (GC) for this new Python build.
Move beyond chatbots to build durable MCP servers that run for days, survive failures, and orchestrate elicitations and LLM sampling. Learn remote MCP trade-offs and patterns for Anthony Shaw poses the question: Python has had async for 10 years, so why isn't it more popular? He dives deep on where async is useful and where it is limited. Associated Don't miss Glean's product launch on Sept 25th.
The new Placeholder, added in Python 3.14, only makes sense in the context of functools.partial, so in order to understand Placeholder you will need to understand how functools.partial works and how to use it. In a nutshell, partial allows you to perform partial function application, by "freezing" arguments to functions. How to pass arguments to functools.partial Up until Python 3.13, you could use partial to freeze arguments in two types of ways: you could pass positional arguments to partial, which would be passed in the same order to the function being used with partial; or you could pass keyword arguments to partial, which would be passed with the same name to the function being used with partial.