Polars: py-1.4.0 Release

🚀 Performance improvements

• Delay selection expansion (#18011)
• Optimize strings slices (#17996)
• Make .dt.weekday 20x faster (#17992)
• Shrink MemSliceInner enum (#17991)
• Push down slice with non-zero offset to Parquet (#17972)
• Reduce copy in MemSlice (#17983)

✨ Enhancements

• Add nested SQL join support (#18006)
• Push down slice with non-zero offset to Parquet (#17972)
• Add support for binary size method to Expr and Series "bin" namespace (#17924)
• IO plugins (#17939)
• Add SQL interface support for PostgreSQL dollar-quoted string literals (#17940)
• Allow for parsing parquet file where the time zone is stored as lowercase "utc" (#17925)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Add nested SQL join support (#18006)
• Respect strict argument (#17990)
• Multi-output column expressions in frame sort method (#17947)
• Fix Asof join by schema (#17988)
• Set default flags for FFI plugin (#17984)
• Fix glob resolution for Hugging Face (#17958)
• Several parquet reader/writer regressions (#17941)
• Incorrect filter on categorical columns from parquet files (#17950)
• SQL COUNT(DISTINCT x) should not include NULL values (#17930)
• Default to None in pycapsule interface export (#17922)

📖 Documentation

• Fix aggregation guide discrepancies (#18003)
• Ensure last is never ambiguous with max (#17962)
• Documentation for Arrow PyCapsule interface integration (#17935)
• Fix Hugging Face link in user guide (#17943)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Add unit tests for str.contains_any and str.replace_many (#17961)
• Suggest allow_null as replacement (#17969)
• Remove apply_generic, use unary_elementwise (#17902)
• Add general filters in Parquet (#17910)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @JamesCE2001, @MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @coastalwhite, @deanm0000, @deepyaman, @dependabot, @dependabot[bot], @henryharbeck, @kylebarron, @nameexhaustion, @ritchie46 and @wangxiaoying