Python Polars 1.16.0

💥 Breaking changes

• Remove note about guaranteed left join order (#20048)

🚀 Performance improvements

• Expand more filters (#20022)
• Cache the DataFrame schema in get_column_index (#20021)

✨ Enhancements

• Enable creation of independently reusable Config instances (#20053)
• Improved error message on invalid Python Enum init (#20060)
• Improve Polars Enum dtype init from standard Python enums (#19997)
• Add optimized row encoding for Decimals (#20050)
• Add drop_nans method to DataFrame and LazyFrame (#20029)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Improve hist binning around breakpoints (#20054)
• Fix invalid len due to projection pushdown selection of scalar (#20049)
• Fix empty scalar agg type (#20051)
• Improve binning in Series.hist with bin_count when all values are the same (#20034)
• Less intrusive forking warnings (#20032)
• Reading nullable sliced / masked Categoricals from Parquet (#20024)
• Regression in hist panicking on out of bounds index (#20016)
• Fix starts_with out of bounds (#20006)
• Fix incorrect column order for parquet scan with hive columns in file (#19996)
• Incorrectly gave list.len() for masked-out rows (#19999)
• Bug fix in existing fast path for sorted series (#20004)
• Incorrect collect_schema() for fill_null() after an aggregation expression in group-by context (#19993)
• Fix row_by_key typing (#19888)

📖 Documentation

• Remove note about guaranteed left join order (#20048)
• Fix broken links to user guide (#19989)

📦 Build system

• Pin maturin (#20063)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible!
@alexander-beedie, @coastalwhite, @gab23r, @lukemanley, @mcrumiller, @nameexhaustion, @ritchie46, @siddharth-vi, @stijnherfst and @stinodego