Interesting quotes: From http://incubator.apache.org/lucy/faq.html http://incubator.apache.org/lucy/faq.html Are Lucy and Lucene compatible? No. Lucy is a "l

Interesting quotes: From http://incubator.apache.org/lucy/faq.html 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 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.