Polars 1.19.0

🚀 Performance improvements

• Collapse expanded filters in eager (#20493)
• Remove predicate from IR::DataFrame (#20492)
• Use different binview dedup strategy depending on chunks ratio (#20451)
• Generalize the arg_sort fast path onto Column (#20437)
• Dedup binviews up front (#20449)
• Re-enable common subplan elim for new-streaming engine (#20443)
• Don't collect all LHS arrays in gather (#20441)
• Remove prepare_series for gather kernels (#20439)
• Don't always take all data buffers when gathering views (#20435)

✨ Enhancements

• Add Int128 IO support for csv & ipc (#20535)
• Support arbitrary expressions in 'join_where' (#20525)
• Allow use of Python types in cs.by_dtype and col (#20491)
• Add an "include_file_paths" parameter to read_excel and read_ods (#20476)
• Allow more join lossless casting (#20474)
• Accept more generic Iterable[bool] in Series.filter (#20431)
• Allow loading data from multiple Excel/ODS workbooks and worksheets (#20465)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Output index type instead of u32 for sum_horizontal with boolean inputs (#20531)
• Fix more global categorical issues (#20547)
• Update eager join doctest on multiple columns (#20542)
• Revert categorical unique code (#20540)
• Add unique fast path for empty categoricals (#20536)
• Fix various Int128 operations (#20515)
• Fix global cat unique (#20524)
• Fix union (#20523)
• Fix rolling aggregations for various integer types (#20512)
• Ensure ignore_nulls is respected in horizontal sum/mean (#20469)
• Fix incorrectly added sorted flag after append for lexically ordered categorical series (#20414)
• More Int128 testing and related fixes (#20494)
• Validate column names in unique() for empty DataFrames (#20411)
• Implement list.min and list.max for list[i128] (#20488)
• Decimal from physical in horizontal min/max and shift (#20487)
• Don't remove sort if first/last strategy is set in unique (#20481)
• Fix join literal behavior (#20477)
• Validate asof join by args in IR resolving phase (#20473)
• Fix align_frames with single row panicking (#20466)
• Allow multiple column sort for Decimal (#20452)
• Fix mode panicking for String dtype (#20458)
• Return correct schema for sum_horizontal with boolean dtype (#20459)
• Fix return type for add_business_days, millennium, century and combine methods in Series.dt namespace (#20436)

📖 Documentation

• Fix typo in DataFrame.cast (#20532)
• Fix flaky doctests (#20516)
• Add examples for bitwise expressions (#20503)
• Clarify the join pre-condition of join_asof (#20509)
• Fix Expr.all description of Kleene logic (#20409)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Increase categorical test coverage (#20514)
• Report wheel sizes (#20541)
• Add tests for floor/ceil on integers (#20479)
• Expose and rewrite 'can_pre_agg' (#20450)
• Skip test on windows; kuzu import segfaults (#20463)
• Add a TypeCheckRule to the optimizer (#20425)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @Biswas-N, @IndexSeek, @Prathamesh-Ghatole, @Terrigible, @alexander-beedie, @brifitz, @coastalwhite, @dependabot, @dependabot[bot], @jqnatividad, @lukemanley, @mcrumiller, @orlp, @ritchie46 and @siddharth-vi