Release date: Oct. 24, 2022

This is the stable release of Python 3.11.0

Python 3.11.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.11 are:

General changes

• PEP 657 -- Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 -- Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 680 -- tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• gh-90908 -- Introduce task groups to asyncio
• gh-34627 -- Atomic grouping ((?>...)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster CPython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

Typing and typing language changes

• PEP 673 -- Self Type
• PEP 646 -- Variadic Generics
• PEP 675 -- Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 -- Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• PEP 681 -- Data Class Transforms

More resources

• Online Documentation
• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues.
• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

When a spherical non-rotating body of a critical radius collapses under its own gravitation under general relativity, theory suggests it will collapse to a single point. This is not the case with a rotating black hole (a Kerr black hole). With a fluid rotating body, its distribution of mass is not spherical (it shows an equatorial bulge), and it has angular momentum. Since a point cannot support rotation or angular momentum in classical physics (general relativity being a classical theory), the minimal shape of the singularity that can support these properties is instead a ring with zero thickness but non-zero radius, and this is referred to as a ringularity or Kerr singularity.

This kind of singularity has the following peculiar property. The spacetime allows a geodesic curve (describing the movement of observers and photons in spacetime) to pass through the center of this ring singularity. The region beyond permits closed time-like curves. Since the trajectory of observers and particles in general relativity are described by time-like curves, it is possible for observers in this region to return to their past. This interior solution is not likely to be physical and is considered a purely mathematical artefact.

There are some other interesting free-fall trajectories. For example, there is a point in the axis of symmetry that has the property that if an observer is below this point, the pull from the singularity will force the observer to pass through the middle of the ring singularity to the region with closed time-like curves and it will experience repulsive gravity that will push it back to the original region, but then it will experience the pull from the singularity again and will repeat this process forever. This is, of course, only if the extreme gravity doesn’t destroy the observer first.

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