Thistle: A Vector Database in Rust

Abstract

We present Thistle, a fully functional vector database. Thistle is an entry into the domain of latent knowledge use in answering search queries, an ongoing research topic at both start-ups and search engine companies. We implement Thistle with several well-known algorithms, and benchmark results on the MS MARCO dataset. Results help clarify the latent knowledge domain as well as the growing Rust ML ecosystem.