

Apache Lucy - Lucene-like full-text search in C - ot
http://incubator.apache.org/lucy/

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ognyankulev
Interesting quotes:

From <http://incubator.apache.org/lucy/faq.html>

Are Lucy and Lucene compatible?

No. Lucy is a "loose" port of Lucene designed to take full advantage of C's
unique feature set, rather than a line-by-line translation from Java. The two
libraries are not compatible in terms of either file format or API, and there
are no plans to establish such compatibility.

Does Lucy provide a search server like Solr?

Lucy is a low-level library, like Lucene. We'd like to provide a search server
eventually, but it will likely be a thin wrapper rather than a comprehensive
application like Solr. The low-level capabilities are our core mission.

Why don't you use Swig?

A major design goal of Lucy is to present bindings which are as idiomatic as
possible so that our users feel as though they are programming in their native
language and not in C. Swig is a great tool, but it does not offer support for
many of the features which make Lucy so user friendly: subclassing, named
parameters, default argument values, etc.

From <http://wiki.apache.org/lucy/MinimizingObjectOverhead>

Lucy must be designed so that native OO overhead is minimized.

    
    
        Algorithms which create and destroy as few native objects as possible are preferred.
        Native method calls should be avoided for high-volume, performance critical applications. Possible alternatives:
            Change the algo to use a for/while loop (either native or C).
            Use a C struct with a function pointer.
            Use a C function.

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quadhome
In the same class: xapian[1], Sphinx[2] and whistlepig?[3] ;-)

[1] <http://xapian.org/>

[2] <http://sphinxsearch.com/>

[3] <https://github.com/wmorgan/whistlepig>

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dguaraglia
Has anyone here played with Lucy?

I'm looking to move some code from ElasticSearch to _something_ , and still
haven't decided on what. Sphinx looks promising, but their model for adding
documents isn't my favorite. It makes integration with ElasticSearch seem
trivial.

Something like Lucy might be a really good middle ground.

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exDM69
The question is, what was the motivation behind re-writing Java Lucene in C?

~~~
Avshalom
It says on the page: so it can be used by dynamic languages.

~~~
exDM69
That is a very good reason.

This is also why I think that most system level libraries should be written in
C, because it (unfortunately) is one of the only languages that can be called
from pretty much any other language out there.

If you go with JVM or CLR, your software will only run on that virtual
machine. C++ may be possible to some degree but C++'s pass-by-value semantics
make it a bit tricky to export to other languages (with reference based
semantics), so if you have a good C++ API, it won't turn into a nice Python
API. Exception handling and other issues make C++ also tricky.

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hopeless
No more Java dependencies in your Ruby webapp? Sounds promising!

