Python 3.13 was just released and brings fundamental changes to the language, including a new

interactive interpreter, experimental support for running in a free-threaded mode, and adjust-in-time

compiler, or JIT. There are also updates to the Python-type system, module removals, and

dock string improvements among many other changes.

Lucas Langa is a C-Python developer in residence at the Python Software Foundation.

He joins the show with Sean Falconer to talk about maintaining Python,

the evolution of the language, Python optimization, the most impactful changes in Python 3.13 and more.

This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer.

Check the show notes for more information on Sean's work and where to find him.

Lucas, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, thanks for being here.

So you're the C-Python developer residence for the Python Software Foundation.

So I want to start out by asking, like, what does that role entail?

Right. So historically, Python has always been a language that is maintained by a community of volunteers.

There have been companies that employed people who work on Python core, but usually that was not their main job. This recently shifted to a model

that is more alike of having some corporations invest in their own teams, but also other

corporations sponsoring independent developers like myself to work on Python full-time. And in my particular case,

the work is sponsored by meta currently, so thanks to them. But it's work that is maybe less

glamorous than you would expect because being paid for it means I'm essentially the janitor

of Python. So there's a lot of very kind of boring work that needs to be done or just

a little bit of a frustrating work. Like some bot doesn't work. There's a GitHub outage. Some,

...