I've been a long-time user of Pandas, since I'm a data engineer, but only recently learned about Polars: "DataFrames for the new era". ^[1]

Polars uses Rust for a really fast backend, and implements most of the same functionality. It's been pretty much a drop-in replacement for us in many tasks.

I still prefer Spark or Dask for large workloads that benefit from distributed processing, but Polars is impressive for exploring data in notebooks and similar small workloads.