Embeddable HNSW Library for Go
Frustrated by the inability to play with semantic search / ANN in Go w/o a heavy-weight external DB, I created this HNSW library. I hope other gophers find it useful.
Embeddable HNSW Library for Go launched on May 9, 2024 with 11 votes, #1,156 of 4,539 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
Embeddable HNSW Library for Go is an implementation of the HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) algorithm that enables approximate nearest neighbor search and semantic search capabilities directly within Go applications. It is designed for Go developers who want to experiment with vector similarity search without relying on external database systems. The library provides a lightweight, embedded alternative for incorporating ANN functionality into Go projects.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In-memory vector index for Go. Contribute to coder/hnsw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Does a similar job
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A fast HNSW implementation in Rust2024 · github.com · ▲111HNSW implementation in Rust. Reference: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1603/1603.09320.pdf - swapneel/hnsw-rust
HNSW index for vector embeddings in approx 500 LOC2025 · github.com · ▲73Heirarchical Navigable Small Worlds. Contribute to dicroce/hnsw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings2025 · blog.wilsonl.in · ▲699End-to-end deep dive of the project, spanning a large GPU cluster, distributed RocksDB, and terabytes of sharded HNSW.
Tinyhnsw – The Littlest Vector Database2025 · github.com · ▲17In an effort to understand it, I put together a simple, pure python implementation of HNSW, an approximate nearest neighbor library. Learned a lot, and I think for anyone interested in vector search it's an exercise that's absolutely worth doing. The code is optimized (imo) for readability, and working (albeit, quite slowly) on putting together a tutorial that walks through the motivation and implementation of HNSW. There's also working code examples for using the library for text and image search with sentence transformers and CLIP!
htmgo - build simple and scalable systems with golang + htmx2024 · htmgo.dev · ▲166Hey all, I just wanted to share a project I've been working on for the past month. After years of heavy frameworks, I really like the idea of using htmx, but it’s a little too low level for me and needs a thin layer above it to facilitate things like components, better syntax with complex JS inside of an attribute, etc To try and solve this problem with a very minimal stack (golang + htmx) that I've been really enjoying, I'm building this project to cater to my needs and was thinking it would be useful for other developers.
A Go Library for Better Access Control2017 · github.com · ▲158A SDK for access control policies: authorization for the microservice and IoT age. Inspired by AWS IAM policies. Written for Go. - ory/ladon
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