Python 3.0 has been released!

[Ivlivs]

Hello all!

If you check python.org, you will see that Python 3.0 (also known as "Python 3000") has finally been released to the general public. It breaks backward compatibility with the 2.x series in favor of streamlining the language.

Given the extensive redesign, Ren'Py as it stands now would certainly not be able to run on it. However, would Ren'Py even benefit from this anyway?

[PyTom]

The answer is probably yes, at least insofar as python 2 will eventually become obsolete.

That being said, I will wait for a while for bugs to be shook out, for there to be more than one python 3 implementation, and for pygame (and other interesting libraries) to be ported over.

[jack_norton]

I checked the site but don't see any "huge" benefit of Python3 applied to renpy in general, maybe missed something. But is always a wise thing to wait some time so all the bugs are fixed.

[PyTom]

Python 3 is more of a language cleanup than a stunning new features release. I suspect the Ren'Py internals will benefit from it far more than user code.

One advantage I can certainly see using is the new function syntax. Take the current definition of the Move function:

Move(startpos, endpos, time, repeat=False, bounce=False, time_warp=None, **properties)

there isn't really a good way of noting there that repeat, bounce, and time_warp are keyword-only arguments. Something like:

Move(startpos, endpos, time, *, repeat=False, bounce=False, time_warp=None, **properties)

would make that alot clearer.

There's a lot of cleanup I hope to one day do to Ren'Py. For example, xanchor can take 'left', 'center', and 'right' as synonyms for 0.0, 0.5, and 1.0. That probably should go at some point, as it slows down the code a bit for little advantage.

I'm also disliking how we have absolute and relative interpretations for xpos and ypos, based on types. (Placing a picture at xpos=1 versus xpos=1.0 puts it in a wildly different place.) I don't know how to fix this, however.

What I'm expecting to have happen is an always-supported yet feature-locked version of Ren'Py that runs on Python 2, and eventually focus more advanced Ren'Pys on Python 3. But that's still a long way off.

(To port to 3, I'd need pygame support, at a minimum. There are a few other tools I'll look for as a sign of python 3 adoption.)