Python: Library Cleanup and Performance Improvements
Python developers merged 20 pull requests removing deprecated functions, improving profiler performance, and fixing documentation issues. Notable changes include removing the bundled libmpdec library and eliminating several deprecated asyncio functions.
Duration: PT2M
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Python.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Python
- Published: 2026-05-13T10:01:37Z
- Audio duration: PT2M
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning, I'm your host with the Python developer briefing for May 13th, 2026.
Sergey Kirpichev merged a significant change removing Python's bundled copy of the libmpdec library, eliminating over 21,000 lines of code across 71 files. This shifts Python to rely on system-provided libmpdec installations.
Maurycy Pawłowski-Wieroński improved the Tachyon profiler by aggregating identical stack frames in collectors, achieving over 3x performance improvements in sample rates - from 31,000 to over 100,000 samples per second on test workloads.
Jelle Zijlstra fixed an interaction bug between exec and lazy imports, and merged documentation improvements clarifying that type checking functions like is_typeddict and is_dataclass return False for generic aliases.
David Huggins-Daines corrected and expanded base85 encoding documentation for the base64 and binascii modules, clarifying the three different base85 standards and their behaviors.
Several cleanup efforts landed. Nikita Sobolev removed the deprecated asyncio.iscoroutinefunction and eliminated support for undotted extensions in mimetypes.MimeType.add_type. Stan Ulbrych removed the deprecated sys._enablelegacywindowsfsencoding function.
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