Python 2.7 released

[uggedal]

The obligatory What's New in Python 2.7 document: http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html

[jvdh]

Link is broken now, should be: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.7.html

(Which is actually from the future! "Python 2.7 was released on July 7, 2010.")

[barnaby]

Looks like a nice batch of new features added.

[j_baker]

I'm disappointed that distutils2 didn't make it in this release. Does that mean it won't be in the standard library until the 3.x series?

[jnoller]

It simply was not going to be ready - and with the amount of churn and changes going on in that space, it was felt that the community would be better served with something stable, later (but still install-able via pip/etc) then something unstable and still cooking.

[kingkilr]

That's correct. This was a decision made at the language summit at PyCon 2010.

[tomazmuraus]

Great, now we finally have long awaited ordered dictionary in 2.x branch as well :)

[inferno0069]

Unfortunately they have non-transitive equality when used with standard dictionaries. For example, if O and R are ordered dictionaries with the same entries in different orders, and D is a standard dictionary with the same entries, then O == D == R but O != R.

[simonista]

I'm confused by why the python 2.x branch is still being actively developed with new features rather than just being maintained for bug fixes. What are the roadmaps and goals of the 2.x verses the 3.x branches?

[xi]

2.7 is the last major release of the 2.x series. The goal was to ease transition to 3.x by backporting some of the features and provide a stable base for people unable or unwilling to jump to 3.x.

[mkramlich]

if you read the release notes and related material you would have found the answer to that question pretty quickly ;)

[AaronMT]

How does one go about updating Python on OSX Snow Leopard?

[telemachos]

I wouldn't recommend overwriting OSX's Python. You can install yourself from source into /usr/local, but a package manager like MacPorts or Homebrew helps a lot. It's a little more work up front - to install the package manager - but it pays itself back over time. Homebrew has 2.6.5 in its main branch, and 2.7 in a fork. See the notes here:

http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/...

I've tried Fink, MacPorts, Rudix and Homebrew. Homebrew isn't perfect, but it's damn good.

[watmough]

There's a useful page here:

http://www.python.org/download/mac/

Basically, since the OS X Python is usually a bit behind, you are recommended to get the full install package.

[babo]

Compiled from source and using it from a separate folder it's fine for me. Also added easy_install from source and used that to install a few libraries like boto, readline, ipython, etc. without a problem.

[rbanffy]

You can also use ports. I assume it will have a 2.7 port shortly, if it doesn't already.

[tomjen3]

Did they remove the global interpreter lock?

And if not, how can the language be used for high concurrency (ala Facebooks tornado).

[troutwine]

In short: epoll. Network IO bound servers need only deal with sockets that have some event ready. Unless I'm mistaken, Tornado isn't written to be highly concurrent, it is, rather, quite asynchronous: they make it very simple to deal with IO only when there is data to process. You _can_ block the whole process with a long lived handler.

[frognibble]

Tornado achieves concurrency using async network IO and multiple instances per core.