C++ implementation

[brj0]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to introduce nndescent, a C++ implementation of the pynndescent project with Python bindings.

Here are some key highlights of nndescent:

The + Side:

• The usage is almost identical to pynndescent.
• Faster Import: Import is very fast compared to pynndescent, which uses numba real-time compilation.
• Faster Index Building: The index build process is quicker compared to the Python implementation.
• Sparse Version Performance: On my platform, the sparse version of nndescent showcases notable performance improvements.

The - Side:

• Benchmark Query Time: While nndescent excels in build time, at the moment the pure query time (after index building and query function preparation) on ANN benchmarks is still slower than pynndescent.
• Until now, nndescent has been developed and tested only on Linux.

I want to emphasize that I'm not a professional programmer; rather this project was undertaken during my free time as a learning experience in C++ with Python bindings. So I assume that there is still much room for improvement regarding my C++ code.

The project is licensed under BSD2. It took a considerable amount of effort to complete, and I hope that someone may find it useful. I welcome any contributions, pull requests, forks or integration into your own projects.

You can find the nndescent repository at this link: https://github.com/brj0/nndescent

Feel free to reach out with any feedback, questions, or suggestions.

Best regards
Jon

[jlmelville]

As someone who also wrote a C++ implementation of NND but kept getting distracted by other things before getting all the features in I wanted, I salute you for getting it over the finish line. Looking forward to checking this out. Congrats.

[Ghazi-Kazmi]

😯