Anthony Sottile and Brian discuss changes that would be cool for pytest, even unrealistic changes. These are changes we'd make to pytest if we didn't ahve to care about backwards compatibilty.

Anthony's list:

1. The import system
2. Multi-process support out of the box
3. Async support
4. Changes to the fixture system
5. Extend the assert rewriting to make it modular
6. Add matchers to assert mechanism
7. Ban test class inheritance

Brian's list: 

1. Extend assert rewriting for custom rewriting, like check
2. pytester matchers available for all tests
3. Throw out nose and unittest compatibility plugins
4. Throw out setup_module, teardown_module and other xunit style functions
5. Remove a bunch of the hook functions
6. Documentation improvement of remaining hook functions which include examples of how to use it
7. Start running tests before collection is done
8. Split collection and running into two processes
9. Have the fixtures be able to know the result of the test during teardown

Links:

• anthonywritescode - YouTube
• anthonywritescode - Twitch
• pytest-asyncio · PyPI
• async test patterns for pytest
• future-fstrings · PyPI
• re-assert · PyPI
• numpy.testing
• Sourcegraph