Polars: py-0.16.8 Release

🚀 Performance improvements

• optimize arr.sum for list array with inner nulls (#7053)
• optimize arr.min/arr.max (#7050)
• optimize arr.mean (#7048)
• optimize arr.sum (#7047)
• optimize 'arg_where' (#7039)
• More efficient handling of *args/**kwargs (#7026)

✨ Enhancements

• allow for simple creation of n-row empty frame/series via clear (#7095)
• Make polars not copy data when importing from arrow (#7084)
• More ergonomic drop args (#7063)
• More ergonomic partition_by args (#7065)
• More ergonomic exclude args (#7082)
• allow inline expressions in asof_join (#7088)
• add 'use_statistics' option to parquet readers (#7087)

🐞 Bug fixes

• allow map_dict on categorical dtype (#7097)
• fix logical types in arr.get (#7094)
• allow fill_null in eager if type now known (#7092)
• do projection just before concat to ensure same sizes (#7089)
• fix 'filter' in groupby context when expression is… (#7041)
• fix type hint of 'when->then->otherwise' (#7040)
• accept more types in from_records (#7033)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Rename pivot aggregate_fn to aggregate_function (#7059)
• Add TYPE_CHECKING lints (#7070)
• Deprecate more non-keyword arguments (#7030)
• Rename kwarg reverse to descending (#6914)
• Rename args f/func to function (#7032)
• let read_csv take Sequence as columns, remove several type: ignore (#7028)
• add example for arr.count_match() (#7029)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @coinflip112, @datapythonista, @jakob-keller, @moritzwilksch, @ritchie46, @stinodego, @universalmind303 and @zundertj