PyPy v7.3.9 security release

The PyPy team is proud to release version 7.3.9 of PyPy. This is a security release to match the recent CPython release and updates the portable pypy tarballs with bzip2 1.0.8, openssl1.1.1n, and libexpat 2.4.7. Along the way this release fixes some issues discovered after the 7.3.8 release and updates sqlite3 to 3.38.2. It includes:

  • PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7 including the stdlib for CPython 2.7.18+ (the + is for backported security updates)
  • PyPy3.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 3.7, including the stdlib for CPython 3.7.13. This will be the last release of PyPy3.7.
  • PyPy3.8, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 3.8, including the stdlib for CPython 3.8.13.
  • PyPy3.9, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 3.9, including the stdlib for CPython 3.9.12. We relate to this as “beta” quality. We welcome testing of this version, if you discover incompatibilities, please report them so we can gain confidence in the version.

The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the multiple release. This is a micro release, all APIs are compatible with the other 7.3 releases. Highlights of the release, since the release of 7.3.8 in February 2022, include:

  • Fixed some failing stdlib tests on PyPy3.9
  • Update the bundled libexpat to 2.4.6 and sqlite3 to 3.38.2

We recommend updating. You can find links to download the v7.3.9 releases here:

We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project. If PyPy is not quite good enough for your needs, we are available for direct consulting work. If PyPy is helping you out, we would love to hear about it and encourage submissions to our blog via a pull request to https://github.com/pypy/pypy.org

We would also like to thank our contributors and encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we need help with all of them: PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, tweaking popular modules to run on PyPy, or general help with making RPython’s JIT even better. Since the 7.3.7 release, we have accepted contributions from 6 new contributors, thanks for pitching in, and welcome to the project!

If you are a python library maintainer and use C-extensions, please consider making a HPy / CFFI / cppyy version of your library that would be performant on PyPy. In any case both cibuildwheel and the multibuild system support building wheels for PyPy.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a Python interpreter, a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7, 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9. It’s fast (PyPy and CPython 3.7.4 performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

We also welcome developers of other dynamic languages to see what RPython can do for them.

This PyPy release supports:

  • x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 64 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD)
  • 64-bit ARM machines running Linux. A shoutout to Huawei for sponsoring the VM running the tests.
  • s390x running Linux
  • big- and little-endian variants of PPC64 running Linux,

PyPy supports Windows 32-bit, PPC64 big- and little-endian, and ARM 32 bit, but does not release binaries. Please reach out to us if you wish to sponsor releases for those platforms.

Known Issues with PyPy3.9

  • We slightly modified the concurrent future’s ProcessExcecutorPool to start all the worker processes when the first task is received (like on Python3.8) to avoid an apparent race condition when using fork and threads (issue 3650).

Changelog

Changes shared across versions

  • Update the bundled libexpat to 2.4.7
  • Update the bundled bzip2 to 1.0.8
  • Update the bundled sqlite3 to 3.38.2 (issues 3690, 3714).
  • Update the bundled openssl to 1.1.1n
  • Add more aliases for pypy: pypy2.exe, pypy2.7.exe, python2.7.exe on windows for pypy2.7 and comparable aliases on posix and other pythons (issues 3693 and 3696)
  • Refactor argument parsing to avoid unwrapping (unboxing) and rewrapping kwargs (Python 3.8+)

C-API (cpyext) and C-extensions

  • Fix to raise an exception when calling PySequence_GetItem('a', -2)

Python 3.7+ bugfixes

  • Fix a slight incompatibility when initializing os.statvfs_result from a length-10 tuple (issue 3686).
  • Fix sys._base_executable when inside a virtualenv on windows (issue 3323)
  • Use shutil.which instead of distutils.spawn.find_executable in sysconfig (issue 3703)

Python 3.8+ C-API (cpyext) fixes

  • Fix overflow return value in PyNumber_AsSsize_t on windows
  • Adopted PEP 3123 declarations to avoid -Wstrict-aliasing compiler warnings (issue 3706)
  • Allocate a wrapperbase struct and assign it to d_base of PyWrapperDescrObject

Python 3.9+ fixes

  • We fixed a known performance regression of the previous release, where some uses of **kwargs in function calls were slower than in PyPy3.8 (issue 3649).