Summary – Release highlights
Python 3.12 is the latest stable release of the Python programming language, with a mix of changes to the language and the standard library. The library changes focus on cleaning up deprecated APIs, usability, and correctness. Of note, the distutils package has been removed from the standard library. Filesystem support in os and pathlib has seen a number of improvements, and several modules have better performance.

The language changes focus on usability, as f-strings have had many limitations removed and ‘Did you mean …’ suggestions continue to improve. The new type parameter syntax and type statement improve ergonomics for using generic types and type aliases with static type checkers.

This article doesn’t attempt to provide a complete specification of all new features, but instead gives a convenient overview. For full details, you should refer to the documentation, such as the Library Reference and Language Reference. If you want to understand the complete implementation and design rationale for a change, refer to the PEP for a particular new feature; but note that PEPs usually are not kept up-to-date once a feature has been fully implemented.

New syntax features:

PEP 695, type parameter syntax and the type statement

New grammar features:

PEP 701, f-strings in the grammar

Interpreter improvements:

PEP 684, a unique per-interpreter GIL

PEP 669, low impact monitoring

Improved ‘Did you mean …’ suggestions for NameError, ImportError, and SyntaxError exceptions

Python data model improvements:

PEP 688, using the buffer protocol from Python

Significant improvements in the standard library:

The pathlib.Path class now supports subclassing

The os module received several improvements for Windows support

A command-line interface has been added to the sqlite3 module

isinstance() checks against runtime-checkable protocols enjoy a speed up of between two and 20 times

The asyncio package has had a number of performance improvements, with some benchmarks showing a 75% speed up.

A command-line interface has been added to the uuid module

Due to the changes in PEP 701, producing tokens via the tokenize module is up to 64% faster.

Security improvements:

Replace the builtin hashlib implementations of SHA1, SHA3, SHA2-384, SHA2-512, and MD5 with formally verified code from the HACL* project. These builtin implementations remain as fallbacks that are only used when OpenSSL does not provide them.

C API improvements:

PEP 697, unstable C API tier

PEP 683, immortal objects

CPython implementation improvements:

PEP 709, comprehension inlining

CPython support for the Linux perf profiler

Implement stack overflow protection on supported platforms

New typing features:

PEP 692, using TypedDict to annotate **kwargs

PEP 698, typing.override() decorator

Important deprecations, removals or restrictions:

PEP 623: Remove wstr from Unicode objects in Python’s C API, reducing the size of every str object by at least 8 bytes.

PEP 632: Remove the distutils package. See the migration guide for advice replacing the APIs it provided. The third-party Setuptools package continues to provide distutils, if you still require it in Python 3.12 and beyond.

gh-95299: Do not pre-install setuptools in virtual environments created with venv. This means that distutils, setuptools, pkg_resources, and easy_install will no longer available by default; to access these run pip install setuptools in the activated virtual environment.

The asynchat, asyncore, and imp modules have been removed, along with several unittest.TestCase method aliases.