Which versions of Python should the frontend support?

[j2kun]

Since the correctness of the Python will soon (if it doesn't already) depend on the Python version. In particular, we read python bytecode as part of emitting mlir (nontrivially in #1307) and the bytecode spec changes version to version. Since Python is now on version 3.13, I think supporting as far back as 3.9/3.10 might be overkill.

Also, our dependency numba is gradually dropping support of earlier versions of Python. The version we have currently pinned (numba 0.60) is the last one to support Python3.9 and the last not to support Python3.13. So for now at least we are stuck with Python 3.9-3.12, and if we want to upgrade numba to get support for Python3.13, we would need to drop Python3.9.

[AlexanderViand-Intel]

The way I'm expressing the tensor type hints (i.e., Tensor[16,16, I32] for tensor<16x16xi32> ) in the frontend will require Python 3.11 because that's when variadic generics became available: https://peps.python.org/pep-0646/ , so I think even Python 3.10 support might be difficult.

[j2kun]

Sounds like Python3.11 is a minimum version, and the remaining question is, should we aim to additionally support 3.12 & 3.13 as a public-facing guarantee (i.e., add it to a CI version matrix, add the requisite special cases of bytecode, and bump the numba version) or let it remain best-effort?