Polars 1.9.0

🚀 Performance improvements

• Use List's TotalEqKernel (#18984)

✨ Enhancements

• Bitwise operations / aggregations (#18994)
• Allow insert_column to take expressions (#19024)
• Improved error message DSL -> IR resolving (#19032)
• Add strict param to eager/lazy frame "rename" (#19017)
• Support schema arg in read/scan_parquet() (#19013)
• Add include_file_paths parameter to read_parquet (#19008)
• Add allow_missing_columns option to read/scan_parquet (#18922)
• Drop python 3.8 support (#18965)
• Use FFI to extract Series from different Polars binaries (#18964)
• Allow for zero-width fixed size lists (#18940)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Remove failing temporal lit tests (#19056)
• Divide-by-zero in OOC sort (#19048)
• Ensure must_flush flag is not reset (#19046)
• Error node should be on top (#19045)
• Force nested struct missing equality (#19031)
• Fix invalid alias udf (#19021)
• Raise invalid predicate join_where (#19020)
• Fix nested flag of functions with multiple arguments (#19016)
• Fix projection pushdown bug in IEJOINS (#19015)
• Separate temporal tests (#19012)
• Return the truth values of ne_missing and eq_missing operations for struct instead of null (#18930)
• Fix list to numpy conversion (#19009)
• Fix struct broadcasting comparisons (#19003)
• Wrong result on when().then().otherwise() on struct when both result are broadcast (#19000)
• Improve literals for temporal subclasses (#18998)
• Ensure same fmt in Series/AnyValue to string cast (#18982)
• Return correct value for when().then().else() on structs when using first()\last() (#18969)
• IPC don't write variadic_buffer_counts in blocks, but only dictionaries (#18980)
• Respect allow_threading in TernaryExpr (#18977)
• Make join test order-agnostic (#18975)
• Fix lit().shrink_dtype() broadcasting (#18958)
• Parallel evaluation of cumulative_eval (#18959)
• Properly implement AnyValue::Binary into_py (#18960)
• Fix Expr.over with order_by did not take effect if group keys were sorted (#18947)
• Properly fetch type of full None List Series (#18916)
• Incorrect mode for sorted input (#18945)
• Properly choose inner physical type for Array (#18942)
• Disable very old date in timezone test for CI (#18935)
• Infer reshape dims when determining schema (#18923)
• Incorrect broadcasting on list-of-string set ops (#18918)
• Adding with_row_index() to previously collected lazy scan does not take effect (#18913)

📖 Documentation

• Fix example of lazy schema verification (#19059)
• Rewrite 'Getting started' page (#19028)
• Fix is_not_nan description (#18985)
• Recommend targetDir for rust-analyzer (#18973)
• Fix LazyFrame fetch method references (#18033)

📦 Build system

• Bump Rust toolchain to nightly-2024-09-29 (#19006)
• Bump simd-json to 0.14 (#18999)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Remove built info (#19057)
• Mark schema arg in read/scan_parquet as unstable (#19018)
• Fix new-streaming test_lazy_parquet::test_row_index (#19019)
• Preserve scalar in more places (#18898)
• Mention allow_missing_columns in error message when column not found (parquet) (#18972)
• Disable CSE-specific test on new streaming engine (#18971)
• Add FixedSizeList equality broadcasting (#18967)
• Divide ChunkCompare into Eq and Ineq variants (#18963)
• Another set of new-stream test skip/fixes (#18952)
• Fix/skip variety of new-streaming tests, cont (#18928)
• Fix/skip variety of new-streaming tests (#18924)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @LukasFolwarczny, @Plutone11011, @aleexharris, @alexander-beedie, @barak1412, @coastalwhite, @dependabot, @dependabot[bot], @edwinvehmaanpera, @kgv, @mcrumiller, @nameexhaustion, @orlp, @ritchie46, @rodrigogiraoserrao, @stinodego and @xhiroga