// the find
hora-search/hora
🚀 efficient approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm collections library written in Rust 🦀 .
Hora is a pure-Rust ANN library implementing HNSW, SSG, PQ-IVF, and brute-force indexes with SIMD-accelerated distance metrics. It targets the gap between heavy C++ libraries like Faiss and simpler single-algorithm options, with bindings for Python, JS (WASM), and Java. Useful if you want ANN search without pulling in a database or a C dependency chain.
SIMD-accelerated distance calculations (dot product, cosine, Euclidean, Manhattan) via packed_simd give genuinely competitive throughput on x86. The WASM target is real and usable — running HNSW in the browser without a server round-trip is actually novel. No BLAS or heavy native deps means it compiles cleanly in constrained environments. Multiple index types in one crate means you can swap algorithms without changing your interface code.
The repo has been essentially dormant since mid-2023 — open issues pile up, several language bindings (Go, Ruby, Swift) are marked WIP and were never finished. The single benchmark is on a t2.medium with one dataset; there's no comparison to hnswlib or usearch on modern hardware, so the performance claims are hard to verify. Index persistence (save/load to disk) is missing from the core library, which makes it nearly useless for anything beyond in-memory toy workloads. The packed_simd dependency is still nightly-only gated in practice, and the crate version has been stuck at 0.1.1 for years.