Python 3.13 beta 1 is out, and I've been working on the openSUSE Tumbleweed package to get it ready for the release.

Installing python 3.13 beta 1 in Tumbleweed

If you are adventurous enough to want to test the python 3.13 and you are using openSUSE Tumbleweed, you can give it a try and install the current devel package:

# zypper addrepo -p 1000 https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:languages:python:Factory/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:python:Factory.repo
# zypper refresh
# zypper install python313

What's new in Python 3.13

Python interpreter is pretty stable nowadays and it doesn't change too much to keep code compatible between versions, so if you are writing modern Python, your code should continue working whit this new version. But it's actively developed and new versions have cool new functionalities.

1. New and improved interactive interpreter, colorized prompts, multiline editing with history preservation, interactive help with F1, history browsing with F2, paste mode with F3.
2. A set of performance improvements.
3. Removal of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.

Enabling Experimental JIT Compiler

The python 3.13 version will arrive with an experimental functionality to improve performance. We're building with the --enable-experimental-jit=yes-off so it's disabled by default but it can be enabled with a virtualenv before launching:

$ PYTHON_JIT=1 python3.13

Free-threaded CPython

The python 3.13 has another build option to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (--disable-gil), but we're not enabling it because in this case it's not possible to keep the same behavior. Building with disabled-gil will break compatibility.

In any case, maybe it's interesting to be able to provide another version of the interpreter with the GIL disabled, for specific cases where the performance is something critical, but that's something to evaluate.

We can think about having a python313-nogil package, but it's not something trivial to be able to have python313 and python313-nogil at the same time in the same system installation, so I'm not planning to work on that for now.