[gouyt13]

Release 0.8.4: the faster input validation from #223. #224 adds a CI test only.

Changes

• Version 0.8.4 in pyproject.toml and CMakeLists.txt. Install pins, clone commands and version text are updated in the README, home page, installation, quick start and C++ integration pages.
• New docs/docs/releases/0.8.4.md, listed under 0.8 in the release-notes navigation.
• README news gains v0.8.4 and keeps the three most recent entries.

The home page's benchmark sentence still names 0.8.2, the version the published results were measured on.

Release notes measurement

The notes give one timing of check_coordinates, measured on its own and not as part of an add or search.

• Setup: 1,000,000 × 960 standard-normal floats. Pinned to one core of a Xeon Gold 6418H, GCC 14.3 -O3 -DNDEBUG, on an unisolated host (load average about 20 on 96 CPUs).
• Protocol: the header from v0.8.3 and from main, in the same harness, alternating, 11 calls per run.
• Result: run medians for v0.8.3 were 774, 822 and 754 ms; for main they were 440, 431 and 444 ms.
• Earlier measurement: perf(utils): check coordinates in a single pass #223's author measured 0.345 s → 0.177 s on a Ryzen 7730U.

Checks

• python -m mkdocs build --strict --config-file docs/mkdocs.yml and git diff --check pass. The .github/scripts unit tests (60) pass.
• The package builds as rabitqlib-0.8.4, and rabitqlib.__version__ reports 0.8.4. The Python suite ran against that build: 1130 passed, 18 skipped. The skips are C++ example targets that were not built and wheel-only platform tests.
• Core and FastScan with OpenMP and native optimization off, zvec's configuration: 195 of 195 pass (Xeon Gold 6418H, GCC 14.3, Linux x86-64).
• The code is that of main at d6c7e25, whose Test, Python Wheel and Release wheels runs passed.

Downstream compatibility (before merging the version bump)

• zvec: still pins RaBitQ-Library 0.7.0, so this release does not change its build.
  • The changed header, utils/input_checks.hpp, is included by core/encoder.hpp and fastscan/detail/lut.hpp, which zvec uses. Neither calls check_coordinates, the only function whose code changed.
  • The zvec build check (Downstream check: zvec on 0.8.2 #219) has not been run.
• txtai:
  • tests/python/test_txtai_compat.py mirrors txtai's adapter call for call; it passes against the 0.8.4 build.
  • The real txtai adapter has not been run, because txtai is not installed in the test environment.
  • Its index paths change only in this validation step, and the error messages stay the same.