gllm: Pure Rust Local Embeddings & Reranking

gllm is a pure Rust library for local text embeddings and reranking, built on the Burn deep learning framework. It provides an OpenAI SDK-style API with zero external C dependencies, supporting static compilation.

✨ What You Can Do With gllm

📝 Generate text embeddings - Convert text into high-dimensional vectors for semantic search
🔄 Rerank documents - Sort documents by relevance to a query using cross-encoders
⚡ High performance - GPU acceleration with WGPU or CPU-only inference
🎯 Production ready - Pure Rust implementation with static compilation support
🚀 Easy to use - OpenAI-style API with builder patterns

📦 Installation

Requirements

Rust 1.70+ (2021 edition)
Memory - Minimum 2GB RAM, 4GB+ recommended for larger models
GPU (Optional) - For faster inference with WGPU backend

Step 1: Add to Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
gllm = "0.2"

Step 2: Choose Your Backend

# Option 1: Default (WGPU GPU support + CPU fallback)
gllm = "0.2"

# Option 2: CPU-only (no GPU dependencies, pure Rust)
gllm = { version = "0.2", features = ["cpu"] }

# Option 3: With async support (tokio)
gllm = { version = "0.2", features = ["tokio"] }

# Option 4: CPU-only + async
gllm = { version = "0.2", features = ["cpu", "tokio"] }

Step 3: Start Using (5 minutes)

See the Quick Start section below.

ℹ️ Feature Flags

Feature	Default	Description
`wgpu`	✅	GPU acceleration using WGPU (Vulkan/DX12/Metal)
`cpu`	❌	CPU-only inference using ndarray (pure Rust)
`tokio`	❌	Async interface support (same API, add `.await`)

GPU Support

The WGPU backend supports:

NVIDIA GPUs - via Vulkan or CUDA
AMD GPUs - via Vulkan or DirectX
Intel GPUs - via Vulkan or DirectX
Apple Silicon - via Metal
Intel/AMD CPUs - Fallback to CPU compute

🎯 Supported Models

gllm includes built-in aliases for 26 popular models and supports any HuggingFace SafeTensors model.

Built-in Model Aliases (26 Models)

🔄 Text Embedding Models (18 models)

Alias	HuggingFace Model	Dimensions	Speed	Best For
BGE Series
`bge-small-zh`	`BAAI/bge-small-zh-v1.5`	512	Fast	🇨🇳 Chinese, lightweight
`bge-small-en`	`BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5`	384	Fast	🇺🇸 English, lightweight
`bge-base-en`	`BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5`	768	Medium	🇺🇸 English balanced
`bge-large-en`	`BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5`	1024	Slow	🇺🇸 English high accuracy

🎯 Document Reranking Models (8 models)

Alias	HuggingFace Model	Speed	Best For
BGE Rerankers
`bge-reranker-v2`	`BAAI/bge-reranker-v2-m3`	Medium	🌍 Multilingual reranking
`bge-reranker-large`	`BAAI/bge-reranker-large`	Slow	🎯 High accuracy
`bge-reranker-base`	`BAAI/bge-reranker-base`	Fast	⚡ Fast reranking

Using Custom Models

You can use any HuggingFace SafeTensors model directly:

// Use any HuggingFace SafeTensors model
let client = Client::new("sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2")?;

// Or use colon notation for shorthand
let client = Client::new("sentence-transformers:all-MiniLM-L6-v2")?;

🎛️ Model Selection Guide

Embedding Models - Choose Based On:

🚀 Speed & Efficiency

bge-small-en / e5-small / all-MiniLM-L6-v2 - Fastest, 384 dims
Perfect for high-throughput applications

⚖️ Balance of Speed & Accuracy

bge-base-en / e5-base / all-mpnet-base-v2 - 768 dims
Great general-purpose choice

🎯 High Accuracy

bge-large-en / e5-large - 1024 dims
Best for quality-critical applications

🌍 Multilingual & Chinese Support

bge-small-zh - 512 dims, Chinese optimized
m3e-base - 768 dims, Chinese high quality
multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 - 384 dims, 50+ languages

Reranking Models - Choose Based On:

⚡ Fast Reranking

bge-reranker-base / ms-marco-TinyBERT-L-2-v2
Best for real-time applications

🎯 Balanced Performance

bge-reranker-v2 / ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2
Good accuracy with reasonable speed

🏆 High Accuracy

bge-reranker-large / ms-marco-MiniLM-L-12-v2
Maximum quality for batch processing

Model Requirements

Embedding Models: BERT-style encoder models with SafeTensors weights
Rerank Models: Cross-encoder models with SafeTensors weights
Format: SafeTensors (.safetensors files)
Tokenizer: HuggingFace compatible tokenizer files

🚀 Quick Start

Text Embeddings

Generate semantic embeddings for search, clustering, or similarity matching:

use gllm::Client;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Create client with built-in model (auto-downloaded from HuggingFace)
    let client = Client::new("bge-small-en")?;

    // Generate embeddings for multiple texts
    let response = client
        .embeddings([
            "What is machine learning?",
            "How does neural network work?",
            "Python programming tutorial"
        ])
        .generate()?;

    // Process results
    for embedding in response.embeddings {
        println!("Text {}: {} dimensional vector",
                 embedding.index,
                 embedding.embedding.len());
    }

    println!("Used {} tokens", response.usage.total_tokens);
    Ok(())
}

Document Reranking

Sort documents by relevance to improve search results:

use gllm::Client;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let client = Client::new("bge-reranker-v2")?;

    let query = "What are the benefits of renewable energy?";
    let documents = vec![
        "Solar power is clean and sustainable.",
        "Yesterday's weather was sunny.",
        "Wind energy reduces carbon emissions significantly.",
        "Traditional fossil fuels cause pollution.",
        "The stock market closed higher today."
    ];

    // Rerank documents and get top 3 most relevant
    let response = client
        .rerank(query, documents)
        .top_n(3)
        .return_documents(true)  // Include original documents in response
        .generate()?;

    println!("Reranked results:");
    for result in response.results {
        println!("Score: {:.4}", result.score);
        if let Some(doc) = result.document {
            println!("Document: {}", doc);
        }
        println!();
    }

    Ok(())
}

Async Support

For async applications, enable the tokio feature:

[dependencies]
gllm = { version = "0.2", features = ["tokio"] }
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["rt-multi-thread", "macros"] }

use gllm::Client;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Same API as sync, just add .await
    let client = Client::new("bge-small-en").await?;

    // Embeddings
    let response = client
        .embeddings(["Hello world", "Async programming"])
        .generate()
        .await?;

    for embedding in response.embeddings {
        println!("Vector: {} dimensions", embedding.embedding.len());
    }

    // Reranking
    let client = Client::new("bge-reranker-v2").await?;

    let response = client
        .rerank("What is machine learning?", [
            "Machine learning is a subset of AI",
            "Python is a programming language",
            "Deep learning uses neural networks",
        ])
        .top_n(2)
        .generate()
        .await?;

    for result in response.results {
        println!("Score: {:.4}, Index: {}", result.score, result.index);
    }

    Ok(())
}

🔧 Advanced Usage

Custom Configuration

use gllm::{Client, ClientConfig, Device};

let config = ClientConfig {
    models_dir: "/custom/model/path".into(),        // Override model storage (default: ~/.gllm/models)
    device: Device::Auto,                           // Auto-select GPU/CPU (or Device::Cpu, Device::Gpu)
};

let client = Client::with_config("bge-small-en", config)?;

Batch Processing

let texts: Vec<String> = vec![
    "First document".to_string(),
    "Second document".to_string(),
    // ... thousands more documents
];

let response = client.embeddings(texts).generate()?;

// Process embeddings efficiently
for embedding in response.embeddings {
    // Process each vector
}

Vector Search

use std::collections::HashMap;

let query = "machine learning tutorials";
let documents = vec![
    "Introduction to machine learning",
    "Deep learning with neural networks",
    "Python basics for beginners",
    "Advanced calculus topics"
];

// Generate query embedding
let query_response = client.embeddings([query]).generate()?;
let query_vec = &query_response.embeddings[0].embedding;

// Generate document embeddings
let doc_response = client.embeddings(documents).generate()?;

// Calculate similarities and find best matches
let mut similarities = Vec::new();
for (i, doc_emb) in doc_response.embeddings.iter().enumerate() {
    let similarity = cosine_similarity(query_vec, &doc_emb.embedding);
    similarities.push((i, similarity));
}

// Sort by similarity (descending)
similarities.sort_by(|a, b| b.1.partial_cmp(&a.1).unwrap());

println!("Most relevant documents:");
for (idx, similarity) in similarities.iter().take(3) {
    println!("{} (similarity: {:.4})", documents[*idx], similarity);
}

fn cosine_similarity(a: &[f32], b: &[f32]) -> f32 {
    let dot_product: f32 = a.iter().zip(b.iter()).map(|(x, y)| x * y).sum();
    let norm_a: f32 = a.iter().map(|x| x * x).sum::<f32>().sqrt();
    let norm_b: f32 = b.iter().map(|x| x * x).sum::<f32>().sqrt();
    dot_product / (norm_a * norm_b)
}

🏗️ Architecture

What Makes gllm Special

100% Pure Rust - No C/C++ dependencies, enabling static compilation
Static Compilation Ready - Build self-contained binaries with --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
SafeTensors Only - Secure model format with built-in validation
Auto Model Management - Download and cache models from HuggingFace automatically
Flexible Backends - GPU (WGPU) or CPU inference based on your needs
OpenAI-Compatible API - Familiar builder patterns and response structures

Model Storage

Models are automatically downloaded and cached in ~/.gllm/models/:

~/.gllm/models/
├── BAAI--bge-m3/
│   ├── model.safetensors          # Model weights
│   ├── config.json               # Model configuration
│   ├── tokenizer.json            # Tokenizer
│   └── tokenizer_config.json     # Tokenizer config
└── BAAI--bge-reranker-v2-m3/
    └── ...

🛠️ Installation & Requirements

System Requirements

Rust 1.70+ (2021 edition)
GPU (Optional) - For WGPU backend:
- Vulkan, DirectX 12, Metal, or OpenGL 4.3+ support
Memory - Minimum 2GB RAM, 4GB+ recommended for larger models

Feature Flags

Feature	Default	Description
`wgpu`	✅	GPU acceleration using WGPU
`cpu`	❌	CPU-only inference using ndarray
`tokio`	❌	Async interface support (same API, add `.await`)

Build Examples

# Default (GPU + CPU fallback)
cargo build --release

# CPU-only
cargo build --release --features cpu

# Async support
cargo build --release --features "wgpu,tokio"

# Static compilation
cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

📊 Performance

Benchmarks (BGE-M3, 512-length text)

Backend	Device	Throughput	Memory Usage
WGPU	RTX 4090	~150 texts/sec	~1.2GB
WGPU	Apple M2	~45 texts/sec	~800MB
CPU	Intel i7-12700K	~8 texts/sec	~600MB

Results vary by model size and hardware

🧪 Testing

Run the complete test suite:

# Unit tests only
cargo test --lib

# Integration tests (fast, no model downloads needed)
cargo test --test integration

# E2E tests with real model downloads and inference (requires models in ~/.gllm/models/)
cargo test --test integration -- --ignored

# All tests including E2E
cargo test -- --include-ignored

# Verbose output
cargo test -- --nocapture

Test Coverage

✅ 10 unit tests (model configs, registry, pooling)
✅ 14 integration tests (API, error handling, features)
✅ 8 E2E tests (real model downloads and inference for all 26 models)

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our Contributing Guide for details.

Development Setup

git clone https://github.com/your-org/gllm.git
cd gllm
cargo test

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Acknowledgments

Burn Framework - Pure Rust deep learning framework
HuggingFace - Model hosting and tokenizers
BGE Models - High-quality embedding models
SafeTensors - Secure model format

📚 Related Projects

candle - Rust ML framework
ort - ONNX Runtime bindings
tch - PyTorch bindings

Built with ❤️ in pure Rust 🦀

gllm 0.3.0