Switch eligible casts to non-strict in optimizer (#22850)
Allow predicate passing set_sorted (#22797)
Increase default cross-file parallelism limit for new-streaming multiscan (#22700)
Add elementwise execution mode for list.eval (#22715)
Support optimised init from non-dict Mapping objects in from_records and frame/series constructors (#22638)
Add streaming cross-join node (#22581)
Switch off maintain_order in group-by followed by sort (#22492)

✨ Enhancements

Load AWS endpoint_url using boto3 (#22851)
Implemented list.filter (#22749)
Support binaryoffset in search sorted (#22786)
Add nulls_equal flag to list/arr.contains (#22773)
Implement LazyFrame.match_to_schema (#22726)
Improved time-string parsing and inference (generally, and via the SQL interface) (#22606)
Allow for .over to be called without partition_by (#22712)
Support AnyValue translation from PyMapping values (#22722)
Support optimised init from non-dict Mapping objects in from_records and frame/series constructors (#22638)
Support inference of Int128 dtype from databases that support it (#22682)
Add options to write Parquet field metadata (#22652)
Add cast_options parameter to control type casting in scan_parquet (#22617)
Allow casting List<UInt8> to Binary (#22611)
Allow setting of regex size limit using POLARS_REGEX_SIZE_LIMIT (#22651)
Support use of literal values as "other" when evaluating Series.zip_with (#22632)
Allow to read and write custom file-level parquet metadata (#21806)
Support PEP702 @deprecated decorator behaviour (#22594)
Support grouping by pl.Array (#22575)
Preserve exception type and traceback for errors raised from Python (#22561)
Use fixed-width font in streaming phys plan graph (#22540)

🐞 Bug fixes

Fix RuntimeError when serializing the same DataFrame from multiple threads (#22844)
Fix map_elements predicate pushdown (#22833)
Fix reverse list type (#22832)
Don't require numpy for search_sorted (#22817)
Add type equality checking for relevant methods (#22802)
Invalid output for fill_null after when.then on structs (#22798)
Don't panic for cross join with misaligned chunking (#22799)
Panic on quantile over nulls in rolling window (#22792)
Respect BinaryOffset metadata (#22785)
Correct the output order of PartitionByKey and PartitionParted (#22778)
Fallback to non-strict casting for deprecated casts (#22760)
Clippy on new stable version (#22771)
Handle sliced out remainder for bitmaps (#22759)
Don't merge Enum categories on append (#22765)
Fix unnest() not working on empty struct columns (#22391)
Fix the default value type in Schema init (#22589)
Correct name in unnest error message (#22740)
Provide "schema" to DataFrame, even if empty JSON (#22739)
Properly account for nulls in the is_not_nan check made in drop_nans (#22707)
Incorrect result from SQL count(*) with partition by (#22728)
Fix deadlock joining scanned tables with low thread count (#22672)
Don't allow deserializing incompatible DSL (#22644)
Incorrect null dtype from binary ops in empty group_by (#22721)
Don't mark str.replace_many with Mapping as deprecated (#22697)
Gzip has maximum compression of 9, not 10 (#22685)
Fix predicate pushdown of fallible expressions (#22669)
Fix index out of bounds panic when scanning hugging face (#22661)
Panic on group_by with literal and empty rows (#22621)
Return input instead of panicking if empty subset in drop_nulls() and drop_nans() (#22469)
Bump argminmax to 0.6.3 (#22649)
DSL version deserialization endianness (#22642)
Allow Expr.round() to be called on integer dtypes (#22622)
Fix panic when filtering based on row index column in parquet (#22616)
WASM and PyOdide compile (#22613)
Resolve get() SchemaMismatch panic (#22350)
Panic in group_by_dynamic on single-row df with group_by (#22597)
Add new_streaming feature to polars crate (#22601)
Consistently use Unix epoch as origin for dt.truncate (except weekly buckets which start on Mondays) (#22592)
Fix interpolate on dtype Decimal (#22541)
CSV count rows skipped last line if file did not end with newline (#22577)
Make nested strict casting actually strict (#22497)
Make replace and replace_strict mapping use list literals (#22566)
Allow pivot on Time column (#22550)
Fix error when providing CSV schema with extra columns (#22544)
Panic on bitwise op between Series and Expr (#22527)
Multi-selector regex expansion (#22542)

📖 Documentation

Add pre-release policy (#22808)
Fix broken link to service account page in Polars Cloud docs (#22762)
Add match_to_schema to API reference (#22777)
Provide additional explanation and examples for the value_counts "normalize" parameter (#22756)
Rework documentation for drop/fill for nulls/nans (#22657)
Add documentation to new RoundMode parameter in round (#22555)
Add missing repeat_by to API reference, fixup list.get (#22698)
Fix non-rendering bullet points in scan_iceberg (#22694)
Improve insert_column docstring (description and examples) (#22551)
Improve join documentation (#22556)

📦 Build system

Fix building polars-lazy with certain features (#22846)
Add missing features (#22839)
Patch pyo3 to disable recompilation (#22796)

🛠️ Other improvements

Update Rust Polars versions (#22854)
Add basic smoke test for free-threaded python (#22481)
Update Polars Rust versions (#22834)
Fix nix build (#22809)
Fix flake.nix to work on macos (#22803)
Unused variables on release build (#22800)
Update cloud docs (#22624)
Fix unstable list.eval performance test (#22729)
Add proptest implementations for all Array types (#22711)
Dispatch .write_* to .lazy().sink_*(engine='in-memory') (#22582)
Move to all optimization flags to QueryOptFlags (#22680)
Add test for str.replace_many (#22615)
Stabilize sink_* (#22643)
Add proptest for row-encode (#22626)
Update rust version in nix flake (#22627)
Add a nix flake with a devShell and package (#22246)
Use a wrapper struct to store time zone (#22523)
Add proptest testing for for parquet decoding kernels (#22608)
Include equiprobable as valid quantile method (#22571)
Remove confusing error context calling .collect(_eager=True) (#22602)
Fix test_truncate_path test case (#22598)
Unify function flags into 1 bitset (#22573)
Display the operation behind in-memory-map (#22552)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @IvanIsCoding, @JakubValtar, @Julian-J-S, @LucioFranco, @MarcoGorelli, @WH-2099, @alexander-beedie, @borchero, @bschoenmaeckers, @cmdlineluser, @coastalwhite, @etiennebacher, @florian-klein, @itamarst, @kdn36, @mcrumiller, @nameexhaustion, @nikaltipar, @orlp, @pavelzw, @r-brink, @ritchie46, @stijnherfst, @teotwaki, @timkpaine and @wence-