Polars 1.20.0

⚠️ Deprecations

• Make parameter of str.to_decimal keyword-only (#20570)

🚀 Performance improvements

• Extend functionality on BitmapBuilder and use in Growables (#20754)
• Specialize first/last agg for simple types in new-streaming engine (#20728)
• Use PyO3 to convert between Python and Rust datetimes (#20660)
• Improve state caching and parallelism of window functions (#20689)
• Broadcast without materialization in concat_arr (#20681)
• Cache rolling groups (#20675)
• Use downcast_ref instead of dtype equality in <dyn SeriesTrait as AsRef<ChunkedArray<T>> (#20664)
• Fix performance regression for DataFrame serialization/pickling (#20641)
• Make Parquet verify_dict_indices SIMD (#20623)
• Move to zlib-rs by default and use zstd::with_buffer (#20614)
• Skip filter expansion in eager (#20586)
• Improve unique pred-pd (#20569)

✨ Enhancements

• Allow different python versions for pickle (#20740)
• Add SQL support for the NORMALIZE string function (#20705)
• Add 'allow_exact_matches' join_asof' (#20723)
• Add new-streaming first/last aggregations (#20716)
• Add Parquet Sink to new streaming engine (#20690)
• Make automatic use of Azure storage account keys opt-in (#20652)
• Reduce scan_csv() (and friends') memory usage when using BytesIO (#20649)
• Improve GroupsProxy/GroupsPosition to be sliceable and cheaply cloneable (#20673)
• Add str.normalize() (#20483)
• Allow more group_by agg expressions in the new streaming engine (#20663)
• Support loading Excel Table objects by name (#20654)
• Support writing to file objects from write_excel (#20638)
• Raise DuplicateError if given a pyarrow Table object with duplicate column names (#20624)
• Support writing partitioned parquet to cloud (#20590)
• Add hint to error message for extra struct field in JSON (#20612)
• Add index_of() function to Series and Expr (#19894)
• Update sqlparser-rs, enabling "LEFT" keyword to be optional for anti/semi joins in SQL queries (#20576)
• Add cat.starts_with/cat.ends_with (#20257)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Avoid blocking on async runtime when resolving cloud scans (#20750)
• Fix allow_invalid_certificates being ignored in storage_options (#20744)
• Incorrect output type for map_groups returning all-NULL column (#20743)
• Fix unique(maintain_order=True) raising InvalidOperationError for null array (#20737)
• Don't collapse into a Nested Loop Join if the cross join maintains order (#20729)
• Don't serialize credentials provider (#20741)
• Fix Series.n_unique raising for list of struct (#20724)
• Fix incorrect top-k by sorted column, fix head() returning extra rows (#20722)
• Add outer validity to AnyValueBufferTrusted for structs (#20713)
• Don't partition group-by with non-scalar literals in agg (#20704)
• Fix xor operation of selector with Expr (#20702)
• Incorrect view buffer dedup (#20691)
• Only verify Parquet ConvertedType if no LogicalType is given (#20682)
• Validate length of schema_overrides in read_csv (#20672)
• Fix map_elements ignoring skip_nulls=True for struct dtype (#20668)
• Check for MAP-GROUPS in cloud-eligible (#20662)
• Fix empty output of to_arrow() on filtered unit height DataFrame (#20656)
• Add .default to azure credential provider scope URL (#20651)
• Fix join_asof panicking for invalid tolerance input (#20643)
• Incorrect flag check on is_elementwise (#20646)
• Don't panic but set null type if type is unknown (#20647)
• Fix performance regression for DataFrame serialization/pickling (#20641)
• Fix Int128 dtype serialization (#20629)
• Ensure read_excel and read_ods support reading from raw bytes for all engines (#20636)
• Ensure that SQL LIKE and ILIKE operators support multi-line matches (#20613)
• Properly broadcast in sort_by (#20434)
• Properly load nested Parquet Statistics (#20610)
• AWS environment config was not loaded when credential provider was used (#20611)
• Fix order observability of group-by-dyn (#20615)
• Soundness when loading Parquet string statistics (#20585)
• Fix error filtering after with_columns() on unit height LazyFrame (#20584)
• Propagate tenant_id to CredentialProviderAzure if given (#20583)
• Restore symbols on Apple by bumping nightly version (#20563)
• Fix type annotation of str.strip_chars_* methods (#20565)
• Fix variable name in error message for "unsupported data type" in rolling and upsampling operations (#20553)

📖 Documentation

• Add more information for cross joins (#20753)
• Fix typo in sql functions (cosinus -> cosine) (#20676)
• Add links to read_excel "engine_options" and "read_options" docstring (#20661)
• Fix small typo in plugins (polars-dt -> polars-st) (#20657)
• Add polars-h3 and polars-st to plugin list (#20653)
• Add docs reference for Field (#20625)
• Update DataFrame join examples (#20587)
• Miscellaneous minor updates/fixes (#20573)
• Update "group_by_rolling" (deprecated) to "rolling" in user guide (#20548)

📦 Build system

• Update to official release of PyO3 0.23.4 (#20683)
• Officially support Python 3.13 (#20549)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Fix remote benchmark script (#20755)
• Fix tests (#20745)
• Simplify hive predicate handling in NEW_MULTIFILE (#20730)
• Add tests for various open issues (#20720)
• Fixes an Excel test following new fastexcel release (#20703)
• Add tests for various open issues that have been fixed (#20680)
• Don't include debug symbols in benchmark run (#20571)
• Implement CSV, IPC and NDJson in the MultiScanExec node (#20648)
• Don't rely on argument order of optimization_toggle (#20622)
• Fix Python deps installation in remote-benchmark workflow (#20619)
• Fix flaky categorical test (#20591)
• Bump multiversion from 0.7 to 0.8 (#20543)
• Remove unused nested function in LazyFrame.fill_null (#20558)
• Improve bin size info (#20551)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @Jesse-Bakker, @MarcoGorelli, @MoizesCBF, @SamuelAllain, @alexander-beedie, @bschoenmaeckers, @coastalwhite, @eitsupi, @etiennebacher, @itamarst, @jqnatividad, @lukemanley, @mcrumiller, @nameexhaustion, @orlp, @ritchie46 and @stinodego