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Release of Polars 2.0

144 points simicd 2 hours ago 22 comments

dkgs 1 hour ago | parent

A coincidence with the fact duckdb is supposed to release 2.0.0 very soon? :)

m00dy 1 hour ago | parent

Are they competing for something?

vindex10 1 hour ago | parent

> first class SQL support, which together with the performance improvements has Polars leading DataFusion and DuckDB in TPC-H and TPC-DS1 benchmarks,

Apparently about something ))

orlp 1 hour ago | parent

Actually yes. We had already been planning to do 2.0 for a long time. We originally said we'd move on from 1.x quickly when released 1.0 but ended up staying at 1.x much longer than intended.

From a quick check our first PRs were merged to the 2.0 branch in June:

    2026-06-17T21:27:51Z #27993 chore: Stop coercing `pl.col(...)` to selector ...
    2026-06-18T14:19:26Z #27996 chore!: Replace multi-seed hash API with a single seed
    2026-06-19T07:05:11Z #27991 chore(python!): Remove `Expr.flatten` function

hnd9q09qk4 1 hour ago | parent

Thing I care about most is whether the old eager-vs-lazy footguns got cleaned up. Half my bugs were a stray collect() in a loop killing the query plan.

sgarland 1 hour ago | parent

TIL that Polars supports SQL. Amazing.

tonyhart7 1 hour ago | parent

finally long time coming

cant wait to upgrade my Quant trading bot

m00dy 1 hour ago | parent

I'm also using it for BlockRotate, it's time to upgrade.

gozzoo 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not following the trends closely, but has Polars become a full replacement for Pandas? Are there use cases where one is better suited than the other?

392 1 hour ago | parent

my understanding is Polars is faster, scales better without using external solutions, better API, +Rust. Pandas wins if you want to use what the vast majority of folks are using and have used in the past. Probably has a more complete set of helpers / recipes for the little things you bump into when using it thoroughly, but in the age of LLMs, I think that's minor.

vovavili 43 minutes ago | parent

>Pandas wins if you want to use what the vast majority of folks are using

Vast majority of skilled developers are now using Polars, unless they are constrained by lack of Narwhals support in their third-party library of choice (e.g. Great Expectations, SHAP). That's the more important trend to follow.

esco2292 59 minutes ago | parent

Polars is effectively a full replacement for Pandas for 99.9% of all cases. The only exception I'm really aware of is if you're working with geospatial data, as there isn't yet a "Geopolars" equivalent of the commonly used "Geopandas". However, Geopolars is still in active development and should eventually be production ready.

adeptima 31 minutes ago | parent

it’s on the correct path. i use rust for geo spatial and the gap with c, c++ closing rapidly or negligible in most cases

from https://github.com/pola-rs/geopolars/tree/main

Comparison with GeoPandas

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! GeoPandas — and its underlying libraries of shapely and GEOS — is an incredible production-ready tool.

GeoPolars is nowhere near the functionality or stability of GeoPandas, but competition is good and, due to its pure-Rust core, GeoPolars will be much easier to use in WebAssembly.

ritchie46 5 minutes ago | parent

Note that (for the time being), we started geopolars developement under: https://github.com/pola-rs/geopolars/tree/dev

desipenguin 53 minutes ago | parent

From recent Python Bytes podcast (https://pythonbytes.fm/episodes/show/496/a-lake-house-in-sea...)

> 1 Billion Row Challenge benchmark: Pandas took 4m28s vs. Polars 5.04s and DuckDB 5.19s — DuckDB also used 19x less memory

Python Vs Rust : In terms for speed - No comparison

(The above episode transcript has a link to blog post titled "Pandas should go extinct" )

lmeyerov 14 minutes ago | parent

We were able to do a full port of GFQL from pandas to polars, cypher graph queries on dataframes, including both our CPU + GPU modes, and hit massive speedups: https://www.graphistry.com/blog/cypher-on-polars-cpu-gpu-gra...

It's been impressive!

Vaslo 1 hour ago | parent

My team is all moving over to polars and DuckDB

matthewpick 4 minutes ago | parent

What was your previous setup / stack?

Kinrany 1 hour ago | parent

How does Polars relate to DataFusion these days? There's no reason for them not to converge into a single ecosystem, is there?

esafak 30 minutes ago | parent

It does not use datafusion. https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/issues/6197

dartharva 49 minutes ago | parent

Been using polars for over a year now, it is fantastic.

therno 42 minutes ago | parent

I use Polars 2.0(rc) to (pre)calculate billions of weather scores on https://therno.com and it has been a lifesaver

Happy that I can upgrade to 2.0 final tonight.