Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Pandas is used extensively in pvlib all over the place. However after using it for many years I think it is now outdated and needs to be replaced. It is greedy, slow, inconsistent and the API is awkward and difficult to use.
Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to propose replacing pandas with polars. Polars is a DataFrame interface built in Rust with many, many performance benefits. Too many to list them here, so I suggest visiting their page to learn more.
I know this is a very big change, but I believe it will lead to some serious performance and usability benefits. So there is no real plan yet, I would like to just start the discussion and see what others think. I think a good starting point would be to benchmark some performance-critical pvlib code in pandas and polars so we can quantify what the performance benefits for pvlib would be.