building python 3.13.0 beta 2 on linux mint 21.3

whbeebe

June 7

Python 3.13.0 Beta 2 was released Thursday 6 June by the Python Foundation (see link to announcement below). I downloaded the sources and built it. Here's what I did to set up a build environment for this beta release and the features I selected to build this beta.

Install Build Prerequisites

You need to install the following packages in order to build every module in Python. There is one additional package dependency that Python 3.13 will need to build, and it's libmpdec-dev. Every other Python version prior to 3.13 did not need this package installed.

  sudo apt install zlib1g-dev \  libncurses5-dev \  libgdbm-dev \  libnss3-dev \  libssl-dev \  libreadline-dev \  libffi-dev \  libsqlite3-dev \  libbz2-dev \  tk \  tk-dev \  liblzma-dev \  libgdbm-compat-dev \  libmpdec-dev

Build And Install Python 3.13.0 Beta 2

Download the latest beta Python version from https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130b2/
Untar the file into a work folder of your choice.
Make a build directory at the same level as the untarred source directory.
From within the build directory execute the configure script. In this example we're building Python 3.13.0b1.
../Python-3.13.0b2/configure --enable-optimizations --disable-gil
Note that we are disabling the GIL with this build, which gives us an experimental free-threaded build.
Within the build directory run make.
Install into the alternate location for this version of Python:
sudo -H make altinstall
Check for the alternate location with which python3.13 . It should return /usr/local/bin/python3.13 .

Create A Virtual Work Environment

In your home directory create a work folder. On my system I named it 'VPython', but you can call it whatever you want.
Change directory into it, then create a Python virtual environment using, as an example, python3.13 -m venv 313.
There is a bin directory in the virtual directory you created, which in this example was 313. Start the environment with source 313/bin/activate .

I created an alias so that typing 313 in any shell starts the environment. The alias should source the full path and the script in the virtual environment's bin directory. When active, typing deactivate drops you back to a regular shell environment. See the following screen capture.

The biggest change this beta release is the disabled GIL, or Global Interpreter Lock. The biggest reason for removing the GIL is performance, especially when attempting concurrent processing. We shall see.