Core Dispatch #12

Welcome back to Core Dispatch! This edition covers October 9 through November 6, 2026. Python 3.16.0 alpha 1 is out, with alpha 2 due this Tuesday, November 10. October kept the release team busy: we shipped 16 Python releases, though only five were planned. Ten of the eleven extras were security releases, some of which we cut during the core team sprint. Huge thanks to everyone who helped get them out. The October 26 releases block the compromised eMudhra intermediate CA keys in ssl and include additional security fixes.

On the PEP front, two new proposals cover wheel-variant providers (PEP 850) and list.discard() (PEP 851). The pretty print protocol (PEP 813) is back for discussion after a substantial revision at the core team sprint. The proposed roadmap for a supported JIT (PEP 836) and the proposal to drop LLVM as a JIT build requirement (PEP 774) have both been withdrawn. The Steering Council has made no further decision about the JIT.

On CPython's main branch, notable merges speed up UUID operations, numeric strptime() parsing, and buffered asyncio reads. Free-threaded builds get safer memoryview operations and a fix for a crash in asyncio.

Community updates include proposals for better performance tooling, ecosystem testing with snake_pit, and the updated AI-policy triage process.

Please test your projects with Python 3.16.0 alpha 1 and file any CPython issues you find.