v0.9.6

Added

• Added optional nested environment variable loading and scalar coercion to EnvVarBackend via nested_delimiter and coerce.
• Expanded benchmarks with focused suites for source parsing, merge behavior, Jinja/load interpolation, dot-access lookup, and env backend loading.

Changed

• Optimized DotAccessibleDict.get() dotted traversal to avoid exception-converting attribute lookup on hot paths.

Fixed

• Fixed .env parsing so whitespace-delimited inline comments are stripped while hashes inside quoted or unquoted values are preserved.
• Defined the missing ConfigLoader.load_as type variable so runtime type-hint introspection succeeds.
• Fixed Jinja2ConfigLoader so environment= is honored, the backend is discoverable as jinja2, and rendered in-memory configs are parsed without rejoining the parent base directory.
• Fixed ConfigLoader.load() so merge_options are passed to merge implementations, including mergelists=True.
• Added an explicit TypeError for flatten=True on scalar merged results instead of leaving an unbound local failure path.
• Fixed duplicate path tracking, nested iterable option propagation, and stdlib base_dir glob fallback behavior in parse_sources().

Full Changelog: v0.9.5...v0.9.6