Installation

From PyPI

pip install snapvec

Pre-compiled wheels are published for CPython 3.10-3.13 on Linux (x86_64, aarch64), macOS (x86_64 and arm64, macOS 13+), and Windows (AMD64). NumPy

= 1.24 is the only runtime dependency.

From source

git clone https://github.com/stffns/snapvec.git
cd snapvec
pip install -e ".[dev]"

On macOS you need OpenMP from Homebrew before building:

brew install libomp

Without libomp, the Cython kernels compile in serial mode. The library still works but the parallel search paths do not.

Input dtype

snapvec expects np.float32 inputs everywhere. Internally, add_batch and search pass your arrays through np.asarray(..., dtype=np.float32), so a float64 input will be cast silently. That cast allocates a full copy of the batch on every call, which is easy to miss in a hot path. Prefer float32 at the source.

# Models that return float32 directly (most modern embeddings)
vecs = model.encode(texts)  # already float32

# Arrays from np.array([...]) default to float64 -- cast explicitly
vecs = np.array(vecs_list, dtype=np.float32)

# Loading from disk -- respect the original dtype or force float32
vecs = np.load("embeddings.npy").astype(np.float32, copy=False)

Verify install

import snapvec
print(snapvec.__version__)