# Roadmap
> A living document. ordvec is a small, paper-driven project; this captures
> **direction and scope**, not committed dates.
## Vision
**ordvec is a retrieval _primitive_, not a database.** The goal is to be a
universally embeddable building block for **edge-deployed RAG and on-device /
local AI retrieval** — settings where compute, memory, and storage are tight and
the hardware is heterogeneous (servers, ARM edge devices, browsers / WASM, and
eventually mobile and embedded targets).
Everything distinctive about ordvec serves that end:
- **Training-free encoding** — no codebook, no learned rotation, no fit step,
and nothing to refit when the corpus drifts.
- **Zero system dependencies** — pure Rust, no BLAS / LAPACK / `ndarray` /
`faer`; no native library to install; links and cross-compiles cleanly.
- **Predictable footprint** — exactly `dim × bits / 8` bytes per document, known
before you see any data.
- **Runtime-dispatched SIMD with a scalar fallback** — the same retrieval core
runs anywhere it compiles (AVX-512 / AVX2, NEON, WASM `simd128`, scalar).
## Non-goals
ordvec will **not** grow into a standalone vector database. It deliberately does
not pursue billion-scale navigable-graph ANN, distributed serving / sharding, a
query language, or persistence and transaction machinery beyond its simple file
formats. That is the territory of pgvector, Qdrant, Milvus, LanceDB, and full
Graph-RAG stacks. ordvec stays the **substrate** those systems — and bespoke
edge pipelines — compose, not a competitor to them.
## Direction
The throughline is **"be a good neighbour"**: ordvec should embed _natively_
into more hosts rather than forcing callers to adapt to it.
- **Publish.** A coordinated first release to crates.io (`ordvec`) and PyPI
(`ordvec`), carrying SLSA build provenance and SBOMs (the release machinery is
already in place). Unblocks `docs.rs` and the registry badges.
- **Cross-stack embedding via a C ABI.** A `cdylib` plus a generated C header so
non-Rust / non-Python edge runtimes can link ordvec directly — the single
largest reach multiplier beyond Rust and Python.
- **Adapters.** Thin integration layers for host retrieval / RAG systems. ordvec
factored out of [turbovec](https://github.com/RyanCodrai/turbovec); natural
next targets are mainstream RAG frameworks (via the Python binding) and
Rust-native edge Graph-RAG stacks such as
[EdgeQuake](https://github.com/raphaelmansuy/edgequake), where ordvec could
back the vector-search layer in a Postgres-less / edge deployment —
complementing, not replacing, the graph layer.
- **Broader platform reach.** musllinux wheels (Alpine / minimal containers);
continued aarch64 and WASM coverage.
- **Toward 1.0.** An API-stability pass and a documented compatibility policy.
- **Supply-chain posture.** OpenSSF Best Practices _passing_ is earned;
_silver_ is the next target (governance, this roadmap, coverage reporting).
## Out of scope here
Benchmarks and the intellectual framing live in the OrdVec / RankQuant paper;
this roadmap concerns the crate as an embeddable building block.