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Comment by hbcondo714 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats! Any chance Helixdb can be run in the browser too, maybe via WASM? I'm looking for a vector db that can be pre-populated on the server and then be searched on the client so user queries (chat) stay on-device for privacy / compliance reasons.

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Interesting, we've had a few people ask about this. So essentially you'd call the server to retrieve the HNSW and then store it in the browser and use WASM to query it?

Currently the road block for that is the LMDB storage engine. We have on our own storage engine on our roadmap, which we want to include WASM support with. If you wanna talk about it reach out to my twitter: https://x.com/georgecurtiss

to add to George's reply, for helix to run on the browser with WASM the storage engine has to be completely in memory. At the moment we use LMDB which uses file based storage so that does't work with the browser. As George said, we plan on making our own storage engine and as part of that we aim to have an in-memory implementation.

Not entirely sure if you could use it, but wondering if you’ve heard about the origin private file system feature of modern browsers? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

very interesting, will look into this. I know for a fact that you cannot compile the likes of LMDB and RocksDB to work with WASM but this looks promising for our custom storage engine to be able to make it work with the browser. Thanks for this!

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