The fourth alpha release of Python 3.12.0 has been released, an early developer preview of Python 3.12.

Currently Python 3.12 is in development, 3.12.0a4 is the fourth of seven planned alpha releases, and many new features are still planned and written. The following briefly introduces the main new features and changes of the 3.12 series compared with 3.11:

• Improved error messages, such as suggesting more exceptions that may be caused by typos

• Support for the Linux perf analyzer to report Python function names during trace
• According to the PEP 623 proposal, the deprecated `wstr` and `wstr_length` members in the C language implementation of unicode objects are removed
• In the `unittest` module, removed some long-deprecated methods and classes (they have been deprecated since Python 3.1 or 3.2)
• The deprecated `smtpd` and `distutilsd` modules have been removed (see PEP 594 and PEP 632), the setuptools package (installed by default in virtualenvs and many other places) continues to provide the `distutilsd` module
• Some other old, broken, and deprecated functions, classes, and methods were also removed
• …

The next pre-release version of Python 3.12 will be 3.12.0a5, currently scheduled for 2023-2-6, with a stable release in October.

See the release announcement for details.