Python: Base64 Gets Better and Security Tightens Up
The Python core team shipped 20 pull requests with some fantastic improvements! The biggest story is enhanced Base64 and Base32 encoding with optional padding support, plus important security fixes and performance optimizations. We also see some great community contributions improving documentation and development workflows.
Duration: PT4M29S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Python.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Python
- Published: 2026-04-05T10:03:18Z
- Audio duration: PT4M29S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, Python friends! Welcome back to another episode of the Python podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do we have some exciting updates from the CPython repository to share with you today, April 5th, 2026. Grab your favorite beverage because we've got 20 merged pull requests and 15 additional commits to dive into!
Let's start with the star of today's show - a fantastic enhancement to Python's encoding capabilities. Serhiy Storchaka just landed a major improvement to Base32 and Base64 encoding that developers have been waiting for since 2008! This change adds a new `padded` parameter to functions in both the `binascii` and…
Here's why this is so cool - you can now control whether padding characters get added during encoding, and whether they're required during decoding. This is huge for anyone working with APIs or systems that handle Base64 data differently. The cherry on top? The `base64.urlsafe_b64decode` function no longer requires…
Speaking of improvements, the optimization team has been busy too! Donghee Na delivered two related pull requests that enhance Python's bytecode optimizer. The first adds constant-folding support for set containment operations with frozensets -…
Secur…
Nearby episodes from Python
- Monitoring Events and Security Updates
- Weekly Recap - JIT Infrastructure and Documentation Modernization
- Weekly Recap - Performance & Tooling Improvements
- Weekly Recap - REPL Enhancements & Infrastructure Updates
- JIT Compiler Gets Major Performance Boost
- Code Cleanup and Security Focus
- Spring Cleaning & iOS Evolution
- Base64 Gets a Major Upgrade