Tinyhnsw – The Littlest Vector Database
In 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!
In plain words
Tinyhnsw is a pure Python implementation of HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World), an approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm. Designed for developers wanting to understand vector search, it prioritizes readable code over performance. The project includes a tutorial explaining HNSW's motivation and implementation, plus working examples for text and image search using sentence transformers and CLIP. It's a learning-focused tool for anyone exploring vector databases and similarity search.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
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