Avro-py

What's Changed
As the first avro.py release of the year 2024, it doesn't contain any major changes and is only a maintenance bump in contrast to the previous version.

🎊 Happy new year to every contributor and developer who are using avro.py, and to all GitHub users in general!

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/compare/2023.12.30...2024.1.1

What's Changed
This release focuses on general optimization for text processing inside avro.py, making adjustments for a faster experience. It also focuses on prettier code for making the package even more contributor-friendly!

- Optimized thread pool execution by using faster data types for text processing.
- Faster `parse()` with the use of generators, compiled regex and more.
- Faster `reverse()` with organized code and comprehensions (minimal).
- Overall reduced boilerplate and duplicate code.
- Added [ruff](https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff) as the default linter and formatter.

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/compare/2023.10.26...2023.12.30

What's Changed
This is only a maintenance release and does not contain any changes other than version bumps for several dependencies and pipelines.

Automated PRs
* Bump black from 23.3.0 to 23.7.0 by dependabot in https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/pull/19
* Bump ruff from 0.0.281 to 0.0.282 by dependabot in https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/pull/24

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/compare/2023.7.9...2023.10.26

What's Changed
- **(Experimental)** Added high-level multithreading support for the `parse()` and `reverse()` functions.
- Optimized the LRU cache used for the following functions and discouraged directly wrapping around them.
- Removed the `in_ascii` boolean parameter from the `parse()` function.
- Improved overall codebase structure.

Automated PRs
* Bump ruff from 0.0.276 to 0.0.277 by dependabot in https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/pull/18

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/compare/2023.6.30...2023.7.9

What's Changed
- Implemented **Least Recently Used (LRU)** in some of the core functions.
- As for style-checking and linting, [Flake8](https://flake8.pycqa.org/en/latest) has been replaced with [Ruff](https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff) as the primary option.

Automated PRs
* Bump pytest from 7.3.1 to 7.3.2 by dependabot in https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/pull/14
* Bump pytest from 7.3.2 to 7.4.0 by dependabot in https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/pull/16

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/compare/2023.6.12...2023.6.30

What's Changed

Even though there are no functional changes, major type annotations and other structural changes have been made all across the codebase. Some of them have been noted down below:

- Static type annotation has been encouraged. Although this is a minor change and requires more work for completion, hopefully it'll pave the way to eventually migrate avro.py to a static compiler like [Cython](https://cython.org) for faster operations.
- Tiny changes to the Avro Dictionary have been made to reduce unused entries.
- Chores have been made easy with additional developer configurations for [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/).

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/hitblast/avro.py/compare/2023.4.21...2023.6.12