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Hora

🚀 efficient approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm collections library written in Rust 🦀 .

From hora-search·Updated June 6, 2026·View on GitHub·

**[[Homepage](http://horasearch.com/)]** **[[Document](https://horasearch.com/doc)]** **[[Examples](https://horasearch.com/doc/example.html)]** The project is written primarily in Rust, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 license, first published in 2021. It has gained significant community traction with 2,661 stars and 77 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: algorithm, approximate-nearest-neighbor-search, artificial-intelligence, data-structures, high-performance.

<div align="center"> <img src="asset/logo.svg" width="70%"/> </div> <div align="center"> <h3> English | <a href="https://github.com/hora-search/hora/blob/main/README_FR.md"> Français </a> | <a href="https://github.com/hora-search/hora/blob/main/README_JP.md"> 日本語 </a> | <a href="https://github.com/hora-search/hora/blob/main/README_KR.md">한국어</a> | <a href="https://github.com/hora-search/hora/blob/main/README_RU.md">Русский</a> | <a href="https://github.com/hora-search/hora/blob/main/README_CN.md">中文</a> </h3> </div>

Hora

[Homepage] [Document] [Examples]

Hora Search Everywhere!

Hora is an approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm (wiki) library. We implement all code in Rust🦀 for reliability, high level abstraction and high speeds comparable to C++.

Hora, 「ほら」 in Japanese, sounds like [hōlə], and means Wow, You see! or Look at that!. The name is inspired by a famous Japanese song 「小さな恋のうた」.

Demos

👩 Face-Match [online demo], have a try!

<div align="center"> <img src="asset/demo3.gif" width="100%"/> </div>

🍷 Dream wine comments search [online demo], have a try!

<div align="center"> <img src="asset/demo2.gif" width="100%"/> </div>

Features

  • Performant ⚡️

    • SIMD-Accelerated (packed_simd)
    • Stable algorithm implementation
    • Multiple threads design
  • Supports Multiple Languages ☄️

    • Python
    • Javascript
    • Java
    • Go (WIP)
    • Ruby (WIP)
    • Swift (WIP)
    • R (WIP)
    • Julia (WIP)
    • Can also be used as a service
  • Supports Multiple Indexes 🚀

    • Hierarchical Navigable Small World Graph Index (HNSWIndex) (details)
    • Satellite System Graph (SSGIndex) (details)
    • Product Quantization Inverted File(PQIVFIndex) (details)
    • Random Projection Tree(RPTIndex) (LSH, WIP)
    • BruteForce (BruteForceIndex) (naive implementation with SIMD)
  • Portable 💼

    • Supports WebAssembly
    • Supports Windows, Linux and OS X
    • Supports IOS and Android (WIP)
    • Supports no_std (WIP, partial)
    • No heavy dependencies, such as BLAS
  • Reliability 🔒

    • Rust compiler secures all code
    • Memory managed by Rust for all language libraries such as Python's
    • Broad testing coverage
  • Supports Multiple Distances 🧮

    • Dot Product Distance
      • equation
    • Euclidean Distance
      • equation
    • Manhattan Distance
      • equation
    • Cosine Similarity
      • equation
  • Productive

    • Well documented
    • Elegant, simple and easy to learn API

Installation

Rust

in Cargo.toml

toml
[dependencies] hora = "0.1.1"

Python

Bash
$ pip install horapy

Javascript (WebAssembly)

Bash
$ npm i horajs

Building from source

bash
$ git clone https://github.com/hora-search/hora $ cargo build

Benchmarks

<img src="asset/fashion-mnist-784-euclidean_10_euclidean.png"/>

by aws t2.medium (CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30GHz) more information

Examples

Rust example [more info]

Rust
use hora::core::ann_index::ANNIndex; use rand::{thread_rng, Rng}; use rand_distr::{Distribution, Normal}; pub fn demo() { let n = 1000; let dimension = 64; // make sample points let mut samples = Vec::with_capacity(n); let normal = Normal::new(0.0, 10.0).unwrap(); for _i in 0..n { let mut sample = Vec::with_capacity(dimension); for _j in 0..dimension { sample.push(normal.sample(&mut rand::thread_rng())); } samples.push(sample); } // init index let mut index = hora::index::hnsw_idx::HNSWIndex::<f32, usize>::new( dimension, &hora::index::hnsw_params::HNSWParams::<f32>::default(), ); for (i, sample) in samples.iter().enumerate().take(n) { // add point index.add(sample, i).unwrap(); } index.build(hora::core::metrics::Metric::Euclidean).unwrap(); let mut rng = thread_rng(); let target: usize = rng.gen_range(0..n); // 523 has neighbors: [523, 762, 364, 268, 561, 231, 380, 817, 331, 246] println!( "{:?} has neighbors: {:?}", target, index.search(&samples[target], 10) // search for k nearest neighbors ); }

thank @vaaaaanquish for this complete pure Rust 🦀 image search example, For more information about this example, you can click Pure Rust な近似最近傍探索ライブラリ hora を用いた画像検索を実装する

Python example [more info]

Python
import numpy as np from horapy import HNSWIndex dimension = 50 n = 1000 # init index instance index = HNSWIndex(dimension, "usize") samples = np.float32(np.random.rand(n, dimension)) for i in range(0, len(samples)): # add node index.add(np.float32(samples[i]), i) index.build("euclidean") # build index target = np.random.randint(0, n) # 410 in Hora ANNIndex <HNSWIndexUsize> (dimension: 50, dtype: usize, max_item: 1000000, n_neigh: 32, n_neigh0: 64, ef_build: 20, ef_search: 500, has_deletion: False) # has neighbors: [410, 736, 65, 36, 631, 83, 111, 254, 990, 161] print("{} in {} \nhas neighbors: {}".format( target, index, index.search(samples[target], 10))) # search

JavaScript example [more info]

JavaScript
import * as horajs from "horajs"; const demo = () => { const dimension = 50; var bf_idx = horajs.BruteForceIndexUsize.new(dimension); // var hnsw_idx = horajs.HNSWIndexUsize.new(dimension, 1000000, 32, 64, 20, 500, 16, false); for (var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) { var feature = []; for (var j = 0; j < dimension; j++) { feature.push(Math.random()); } bf_idx.add(feature, i); // add point } bf_idx.build("euclidean"); // build index var feature = []; for (var j = 0; j < dimension; j++) { feature.push(Math.random()); } console.log("bf result", bf_idx.search(feature, 10)); //bf result Uint32Array(10) [704, 113, 358, 835, 408, 379, 117, 414, 808, 826] } (async () => { await horajs.default(); await horajs.init_env(); demo(); })();

Java example [more info]

Java
public void demo() { final int dimension = 2; final float variance = 2.0f; Random fRandom = new Random(); BruteForceIndex bruteforce_idx = new BruteForceIndex(dimension); // init index instance List<float[]> tmp = new ArrayList<>(); for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) { for (int p = 0; p < 10; p++) { float[] features = new float[dimension]; for (int j = 0; j < dimension; j++) { features[j] = getGaussian(fRandom, (float) (i * 10), variance); } bruteforce_idx.add("bf", features, i * 10 + p); // add point tmp.add(features); } } bruteforce_idx.build("bf", "euclidean"); // build index int search_index = fRandom.nextInt(tmp.size()); // nearest neighbor search int[] result = bruteforce_idx.search("bf", 10, tmp.get(search_index)); // [main] INFO com.hora.app.ANNIndexTest - demo bruteforce_idx[7, 8, 0, 5, 3, 9, 1, 6, 4, 2] log.info("demo bruteforce_idx" + Arrays.toString(result)); } private static float getGaussian(Random fRandom, float aMean, float variance) { float r = (float) fRandom.nextGaussian(); return aMean + r * variance; }

Roadmap

  • Full test coverage
  • Implement EFANNA algorithm to achieve faster KNN graph building
  • Swift support and iOS/macOS deployment example
  • Support R
  • support mmap

Related Projects and Comparison

  • Faiss, Annoy, ScaNN:

    • Hora's implementation is strongly inspired by these libraries.
    • Faiss focuses more on the GPU scenerio, and Hora is lighter than Faiss (no heavy dependencies).
    • Hora expects to support more languages, and everything related to performance will be implemented by Rust🦀.
    • Annoy only supports the LSH (Random Projection) algorithm.
    • ScaNN and Faiss are less user-friendly, (e.g. lack of documentation).
    • Hora is ALL IN RUST 🦀.
  • Milvus, Vald, Jina AI

    • Milvus and Vald also support multiple languages, but serve as a service instead of a library
    • Milvus is built upon some libraries such as Faiss, while Hora is a library with all the algorithms implemented itself

Contribute

We appreciate your participation!

We are glad to have you participate, any contributions are welcome, including documentations and tests.
You can create a Pull Request or Issue on GitHub, and we will review it as soon as possible.

We use GitHub issues for tracking suggestions and bugs.

Clone the repo

bash
git clone https://github.com/hora-search/hora

Build

bash
cargo build

Test

bash
cargo test --lib

Try the changes

bash
cd examples cargo run

License

The entire repository is licensed under the Apache License.

Contributors

Showing top 6 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from hora-search/hora via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/15/2026