Polars, a fast DataFrame library, has come a long way since it's inception in 2020. Last year we've been working to create a new engine that outperforms the old one by a factor 5, and that same engine is the core of our (also) new distributed engine that power Polars Cloud.

In this talk, I'll explain what actually changed under the hood to make single-node Polars as fast as it is, and show how the same API extends to terabyte-scale workloads without any rewriting.

Thijs Nieuwdorp is the Developer Relations Engineer at Polars in Amsterdam. As Senior Data Scientist at Xomnia he witnessed the birth of Polars as Ritchie Vink created it during his employment there, and has been using it in his projects ever since. Outside work Thijs enjoys exploring our world through hiking and traveling, and exploring other worlds through books, games, and movies.