Python 3.9rc2 is now out!

Today, the release of Python 3.9rc2 was announced. It is the final planned preview release before the stable version comes out. This release comes with a few new features including Dictionary Merge & Update Operators, new string methods to remove prefixes and suffixes, Builtin Generic Types, and much more.

Please note that this release is not recommended for production use. 

Here are a few Python 3.9rc2 release highlights:

• Check for DeprecationWarning: With the end of Python 2.7 support, many functions that were kept for backward compatibility have been removed or will be removed soon. The team has decided to keep the backward compatibility for one last release. This is to give developers some more time to organize the removal of the Python 2 support and add support for Python 3.9.  

• Dictionary Merge & Update Operators: Proposed in REC 584, the merge (|) and update (|=) operators have been added to the built-in dict class.

• New removeprefix() and removesuffix() string methods: Proposed in REC 616, new methods, str.removeprefix(prefix) and str.removesuffix(suffix) have been added to provide an easy way to remove an unneeded prefix or a suffix from a string. 

• Builtin Generic Types: Proposed in PEP 585, builtin generic types have been added. With this, you would now be able to use built-in collection types such as list and dict as generic types instead of importing the corresponding capitalized types (e.g. List or Dict) from typing. 

Check out the official Python 3.9rc2 release notes for more details.