Python Polars 0.18.3

🚀 Performance improvements

• use row format in streaming join ~15% (#9379)
• row encode buffer reuse (#9371)
• bytes row format for streaming groupby/unique keys >3.5x (#9346)
• push slices down map functions (#9350)

✨ Enhancements

• support all numeric dtypes in serde (#9393)
• allow easy load/save of polars Config options to/from file (#9391)
• ensure part of the plan is streaming if aggregati… (#9387)
• add relaxed concatenation (#9382)
• add sql DROP TABLE (#9355)
• support ternary expressions in streaming (#9343)
• add SQL support for null-aware equality checks (#9332)
• add SQL support for regular expression operators (~, !~, ~*, and !~*) (#9327)
• support // integer floordiv operator in the SQL engine (#9324)

🐞 Bug fixes

• fix bug when comparing series (#9359)
• list zip with (#9367)
• parquet + categorical (#9363)
• respect startby in groupby_dynamic when every is greater than 1d (#9362)
• raise groupby apply on empty frame (#9360)
• raise more informative error on string arguments (#9352)
• Allow for tolerance when comparing nested dtype columns (#9272)
• avoid is_in TypeError with sets of values containing 'None' (#9323)

🛠️ Other improvements

• add top-k test for #9385 (#9388)
• document apply 'return_dtype' requirement (#9361)
• clarify when day of week takes effect in groupby_dynamic (#9342)
• add "if you're coming from pandas" tip to groupby_dynamic (#9336)
• fix string language formatting (#9341)
• add doc entries for eq_missing and ne_missing expressions (#9331)
• fixup options for validate arg in join (#9319)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible!
@0xbe7a, @AnatolyBuga, @MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @dkrako, @durandtibo, @ritchie46 and @universalmind303