Python: XML Cleanup and Memory Tracing Gains
A cluster of XML and Expat fixes tightened spec compliance across ElementTree and SAX, while separate memory-accounting work in OpenSSL bindings gave developers accurate tracemalloc readings for the first time.
Duration: PT2M51S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Python.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Python
- Published: 2026-09-02T13:09:30Z
- Audio duration: PT2M51S
Transcript excerpt
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Good day, and welcome to the Python briefing for September 2nd, 2026.
The clearest pattern today is a broad cleanup of the XML stack. Serhiy Storchaka landed several related fixes: PR 156730 adds standalone document declaration support to ElementTree, matching what minidom already does. A companion commit, e7c93b7, corrects how whitespace is stripped during parsing and…
The second theme is memory visibility. PR 156229 switches OpenSSL usage in the SSL and hash library modules to Python's raw memory allocators. The practical effect: tools like tracemalloc can now actually see that memory, whereas before a default SSL context appeared to use only a couple kilobytes when it was really…
Elsewhere, corona10's fix for missing PyRefTracer destroy events on trashcan objects merged and was backported to both 3.14 and 3.15, closing a gap in reference tracking tools. And on the experimental side, clementperon's Emscripten work, PRs 156781 and 156798, addresses static linking failures by explicitly…
What to remember: if you're instrumenting memory or references, both the OpenSSL allocator fix and the trashcan tracer fix directly improve your tooling's accuracy. And if you touch XML output,…
That's…
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