Python 3.12.0rc2 is the second and last release candidate of Python 3.12, released on Monday, 2023-10-02. This version of Python is now feature complete and no ABI changes will occur before the final release.

It is recommended to encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their packages for 3.12 and publish Python 3.12 wheels on PyPI in time for the final release.

Python 3.12 comes with a number of major and minor improvements. The most notable of these include more flexible f-string parsing, support for the buffer protocol and new debugging/profiling API. Furthermore, Python 3.12 features many performance improvements that are estimated to deliver a 5% overall performance boost.

Python 3.12 also includes a number of deprecations. These include the removal of the wstr and wstr_length members of the C implementation of unicode objects, as well as a number of long deprecated methods and classes in the unittest module. The deprecated smtpd and distutils modules have also been removed with the setuptools package continuing to provide the distutils module. Finally, invalid backslash escape sequences in strings now warn with SyntaxWarning instead of DeprecationWarning, making them more visible.