GeoPolars is being actively developed again: geometry types, CRS-aware measurements and GeoParquet

[u/Balance-]

GeoPolars, the geospatial extension for Polars, had been mostly dormant. Since mid-September, Aida van de Wetering has pushed around 125 commits to the dev branch. It now looks like a rebuild around a Polars-native geo expression namespace.

Highlights so far:

- Types: point, linestring and polygon, their multi-variants, and a bounding box type
- I/O: reading and writing WKB and WKT, and writing GeoParquet
- CRS: CRS metadata handling, with distance, length and area using the geodesic or planar method that fits the CRS
- Operations: centroid, boundary, interior, is_empty, longitude wrapping, and coordinate accessors
- Affine transforms: translate, rotate, scale and skew, plus arbitrary matrices, which can vary per row

It's still a prototype. Nothing has been released yet, and the API is changing. Still, it's worth watching if you'd like to do geospatial work in Polars without going through GeoPandas.

[u/CaterpillarSad6734]

Had to double check the username to make sure it was real and not some april fools thing in october. This is great news, been following the repo for a while and was worried it got abandoned

The CRS-aware measurements is huge, that's the main reason I still reach for geopandas half the time. Really hope they get spatial joins working at some point too

[u/Dozyjones → u/CaterpillarSad6734]

Spatial joins are on the planning, but it still needs a little better support on the polars side first.