alt Hacker NewsIrritatingly, even if you upgrade to the very latest Mac OS X and Xcode, you still get Python 3.9.6.
While you can give people guidance to install a more up-to-date python, everything is much, much harder than the default experience that gives them 3.9.6 (and also once you have them running a custom version with uv or something, may as well just get them to install 3.15!)
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I know Python versions and dependency management is always awkward for people who don't use it every day, but you should almost never use the bundled version of Python on the system, and instead pin a dedicated version for whatever you're developing. And use a virtual environment. uv solves all of this.
> may as well just get them to install 3.15
Exactly. If the project you're trying to run needs a certain version of Python, it's no concern of the system that you're running on, it's a concern of the environment you're running in.
C build environments and linked libraries don't do this, and it's one of the reasons why I am a fan of isolated Python environments. You can't get into dependency conflict resolution hell if the dependencies are defined by a single system.
macOS bundling Python 3.9 is such a pain. That version hit EOL a full year ago. https://devguide.python.org/versions/
This is very deliberate: included scripting runtimes for Python, Ruby are only for compatibility with legacy software, not for any new development. This goes back as far as macOS 10.15 from 2019 [1].
They still haven't gotten around to actually removing them (probably don't want to deal with support/complains), but keeping versions pinned to ancient versions will naturally nudge developers to take care of their own runtime requirements. (They do the same with bash, perl, ruby.)
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...