Developer JIT compiler much improved, but no reinstatement for leaky incremental garbage collector The Python team has released the first beta of version 3.15, with new features including a stable application binary interface (ABI) for free-threaded CPython, lazy imports to speed startup time, a new zero-overhead sampling profiler, use of UTF-8 text encoding by default, and a faster just-in-time (JIT) compiler. Python's development cycle bars new features after the first beta release. There is typically a new feature release in October each year, with version 3.15 currently scheduled for October 1. The option to remove the global interpreter lock (GIL), available in Python 3.14, was the biggest change to Python for years, enabling efficient concurrency on multi-core CPUs. The new stable ABI means that C extensions can now be compiled for multiple minor versions of free-threaded builds, though the team warns  that doing so means only a subset of the full CPython API is available.…