Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com October 10, Microsoft officially announced that it has abandoned support for Python 3.7 in its Visual Studio Code extension.

Currently, although Python 3.7 reached the end of its life cycle in June, it is still a very popular version among the developer community. As a result, Microsoft also issued a statement clarifying that it has not taken the initiative to withdraw its support for Python 3.7at this time.

Although the lack of official support does not necessarily mean that the expansion will stop working with Python 3.7, it does pose a hidden danger.

Microsoft expects the Visual Studio Code extension to continue to support Python 3.7 informally for the foreseeable future, but there may be potential problems without official support.

According to tripartite statistics, about 17.2% of websites that use Python 3.x are using Python 3.7.While Python 3.6, which is supported at the end of 2021, is still the most popular, accounting for 28.9% of the total, Python 3.8is in between, accounting for 23.3%.

In fact, many dependencies in software have also announced their abandonment of Python3.7 support, such as third-party Python libraries and frameworks: Numpy, Pandas, Django4, and so on. This means that if there are serious errors in these libraries, it is difficult to apply fixes on Python 3.7s.

Microsoft also mentioned that other versions of Python are now being released at an annual pace, so once the life cycle of the Python extension, or Python 3.8, ends, Microsoft will stop its official support for it (CTOnews.com Note: Python 3.8 plans to reach EOL in October 2024, so the first extension in 2025 will stop official support), and this strategy will be extended to later versions.

According to Microsoft, Visual Studio's Python extension applies to all actively supported versions of Python. 3.12 is the latest version.

At the end of last year, the Python steering committee announced the decision to "adopt a 12-month release cycle and release a large version a year." It is a foregone conclusion for the Python language project team to plan the development cycle for the new release:

In the five months before the start of the one-year cycle (coinciding with the end of the previous cycle, because the end of each cycle is basically fixing bug, there is plenty of time), developers are free to develop and discuss, submit features, but do not merge into the development branch.

Determine the feature and complete the Alpha version during the first 7 months of the one-year development cycle.

It then took 4 months to repair bug to complete the Beta version.

At the end of the last month, the official version was finally released.

After the official version is released, it will receive full support within one year, and there will be security updates within 5 years.

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