Microsoft has introduced a pre-release version of the Mypy Type Checker extension for Python in their source code editor, Visual Studio Code. This extension enables type checking for Python using Mypy and utilizes dmypy to improve the speed of type checking. While Microsoft already has their own static type checker, Pyright, many developers still prefer using Mypy.
In addition to the Mypy Type Checker extension, the Visual Studio Code team has also localized the Pylance extension. This means that developers can now have commands and other text from the extension translated into their preferred language if they have a language pack installed and set it to be active in VS Code.
A separate Python debugger extension called Debugpy has been developed by the team to address an issue faced by developers when support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.6 was dropped from the Python extension. This resulted in users being unable to update their code base to the latest versions of Python and losing the ability to update their Debug applications. By separating the debugger from the Python extension and disabling the automatic update of the extension, users can now use the latest version of the Python extension while using an older version of the debugger.
Official support for Python 3.7 will end in September 2023, as it has reached its end-of-life (EOL) on June 27, 2023. However, the developers at Microsoft have no plans to actively remove support for Python 3.7 and expect the extension to continue working unofficially with Python 3.7 for the foreseeable future. In line with the annual release cadence of other Python versions, the development team plans to end official support for a Python version once it reaches its EOL in the first expansion release of the following calendar year.
For more information about these changes and improvements, refer to the blog post by the Microsoft team behind Visual Studio Code.
