/**
* Distance functions for vector similarity calculations.
*
* Pure-JavaScript implementations using allocation-free indexed loops: a single
* pass over the two vectors with scalar accumulators and no per-element closures
* or intermediate objects. This is the open-core distance path (the native
* provider owns the SIMD/quantized billion-scale path); for the small/medium
* vectors it serves (e.g. 384-dim sentence embeddings) a tight loop keeps the
* whole computation in registers with zero GC pressure.
* MEASURED (tests/benchmarks/distance-microbench.mjs, dim=384, N=20000, median
* of 41): rewriting cosine from an object-accumulating `reduce` to this loop is
* ~6x on `number[]`; euclidean ~1.4x. (`number[]` is also measurably faster than
* `Float32Array` here — V8 widens f32→f64 on every element read — so the
* resident representation stays `number[]`.)
*/
import { DistanceFunction, Vector } from '../coreTypes.js'
* Calculates the Euclidean (L2) distance between two vectors.
* Lower values indicate higher similarity.
export const euclideanDistance: DistanceFunction = (a: Vector, b: Vector): number => {
if (a.length !== b.length) {
throw new Error('Vectors must have the same dimensions')
}
let sum = 0
const len = a.length
for (let i = 0; i < len; i++) {
const diff = a[i] - b[i]
sum += diff * diff
return Math.sqrt(sum)
* Calculates the cosine distance between two vectors.
* Lower values indicate higher similarity. Range: 0 (identical) to 2 (opposite).
export const cosineDistance: DistanceFunction = (a: Vector, b: Vector): number => {
let dotProduct = 0
let normA = 0
let normB = 0
const av = a[i]
const bv = b[i]
dotProduct += av * bv
normA += av * av
normB += bv * bv
if (normA === 0 || normB === 0) {
return 2 // Maximum distance for zero vectors
const similarity = dotProduct / (Math.sqrt(normA) * Math.sqrt(normB))
// Convert cosine similarity (-1 to 1) to distance (0 to 2)
return 1 - similarity
* Calculates the Manhattan (L1) distance between two vectors.
export const manhattanDistance: DistanceFunction = (a: Vector, b: Vector): number => {
sum += Math.abs(a[i] - b[i])
return sum
* Calculates the dot-product similarity between two vectors, negated to a
* distance metric (lower is better).
export const dotProductDistance: DistanceFunction = (a: Vector, b: Vector): number => {
dotProduct += a[i] * b[i]
return -dotProduct
* Batch distance calculation: the query vector against each candidate.
* With the distance functions now allocation-free indexed loops, this is a thin
* map over the (monomorphic, JIT-inlined) `distanceFunction` — no worker, no
* stringify/`new Function` reconstruction. Kept `async` for call-site
* compatibility with the HNSW search path.
* @param queryVector The query vector to compare against all candidates.
* @param vectors The candidate vectors.
* @param distanceFunction The distance function to use (default: Euclidean).
* @returns The distances, index-aligned with `vectors`.
export async function calculateDistancesBatch(
queryVector: Vector,
vectors: Vector[],
distanceFunction: DistanceFunction = euclideanDistance
): Promise<number[]> {
const out = new Array<number>(vectors.length)
for (let i = 0; i < vectors.length; i++) {
out[i] = distanceFunction(queryVector, vectors[i])
return out