📡 Python radar - September 2024

A personal selection of Python-related news and projects that caught my attention this month (note: leading emojis are mine).

🔧 Please don't hijack my Python root logger (rednafi.com)
For those developing packages used by others, here’s a good practice for configuring logging in your library.

🧩 pocketpy/pocketpy: Portable Python 3.x Interpreter in Modern C (github.com)
A tiny Python interpreter that is easy to embed in a project to offer scripting capabilities in a familiar language.

📦 uv under discussion on Mastodon (simonwillison.net)
There's a lot of talk about the tool uv lately and its potential to be the future of Python packaging, but a small controversy is still stirring the community regarding the fact that this open-source tool comes from a private startup; this article summarizes a discussion on this subject (note: the author Simon Willison is a prolific and interesting blogger to follow, I recommend it).

🖨️ Improved print readability with pprint (hamatti.org)
A handy Python standard module for displaying standard Python objects in a readable manner (for example, nested structures of dictionaries, lists, etc.).

☕ GraalPy - A high-performance embeddable Python 3 runtime for Java (graalvm.org)
After the small embeddable interpreter in C mentioned earlier, here’s a replacement for the venerable Jython to execute Python code from Java.

⚙️ Python's Preprocessor (pydong.org)
A somewhat technical but clever article that presents a simple approach to writing a "preprocessor" for Python scripts (transforms the input script into another script executable by the interpreter) to extend the language's functionalities. Among other examples, the author shows how to allow the use of {} instead of indentation! (horrible)

🦀 Let’s build and optimize a Rust extension for Python (pythonspeed.com)
How to speed up a portion of Python code by replacing it with a Rust extension; for those who are already proficient in Rust.

⚡ Python 3.13 Preview: Free Threading and a JIT Compiler (realpython.com)
A detailed article for getting hands-on with and testing the two experimental features of CPython version 3.13: the absence of the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) allowing true multithreading and the embedded "Just-In-Time" compiler.

⚠️ It’s time to stop using Python 3.8 (pythonspeed.com)
Python 3.8 is reaching its end of life, it's time to migrate.

🔁 ebonnal/streamable: Stream-like manipulation of iterables (github.com)
A Python package for writing elegant chaining of processing on iterable objects using a functional approach.