Polars: py-0.16.12 Release

🚀 Performance improvements

• speed up comparison of sorted arrays ~3.85x. (#7478)
• improve performance for datetime parsing with %Z (#7369)

✨ Enhancements

• slice pushdown in LazyFrame.unique (#7470)
• streaming LazyFrame.unique (#7466)
• automatically infer iso8601-like dates (#7457)
• push down temporal predicates to pyarrow scanner (#7421)
• slice pushdown in scan_arrow_ds (#7449)
• convert decimal 256 to 128 on entry (#7448)
• provide option to set individual row_heights on Excel export (#7447)
• optimise Excel export when all data in a multi-column conditional format is contiguous (#7427)
• dynamically change chunk_size in streaming `explo… (#7415)
• support setting multiple conditional formats on the same Excel table column/range (#7411)
• add unary +,-,! to sql (#7399)
• disallow converting key values to null in map_dict due … (#7393)
• use IO backed reader when low_memory=True. (#7394)
• The big error revamp (#7362)
• parse year-month-day as Datetime in slow-path (#7373)
• support applying one conditional format to multiple columns on Excel export (allows for heatmaps) (#7379)
• Proper superclass for Decimal (#7384)
• tweak default Date and Time format strings for Excel export (#7380)
• make melt streamable (#7364)
• don't rechunk before writing to csv (#7365)

🐞 Bug fixes

• handle an unusual edge-case introspecting dataclass type hints (#7476)
• raise error on categorical by arguments if not fro… (#7464)
• fix and test df.corr (#7463)
• make DataFrame rendering compatible with quarto and pandoc (#7455)
• sql floor & ceil (#7456)
• fix DataFrame table rendering issue in some Jupyter environments (#7450)
• allow for hourly date_range to cross DST (#7430)
• respect lexical/physical in multi-column categoric… (#7417)
• fix null_dtype slice (#7414)
• sort_by logical types (#7412)
• parse single-digit months and dates when code would have gone down fastpath (#7391)
• creating empty struct series with some unit fields (#7383)
• minor Excel export improvements/fixes (#7363)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Rename read_x functions arg file to source (#7460)
• Refactor utils module (#7435)
• Rename functions that clash with builtins (#7424)
• Showcase new ergonomic syntax in README (#7419)
• Rename Decimal prec to precision (#7401)
• Remove _base_type util (#7410)
• Rename first arg of from_x to data (#7407)
• use exc as variable name for all captured exceptions (#7403)
• Remove redundant schema keyword description from `pl.… (#7400)
• Rename cfg module to config (#7385)
• Add test for for groupby referencing the same column twice (#7340)
• Split up datatypes module (#7357)
• Clean up type checking lints (#7358)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @Hofer-Julian, @MarcoGorelli, @SauravMaheshkar, @aldanor, @alexander-beedie, @cjackal, @ghuls, @josh, @juba, @nrebena, @rben01, @ritchie46, @stinodego and @universalmind303