Re: [HELP] a search engine in GNU Guile

[Ralf Mattes <rm@seid-online.de>]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2016 at 09:39:24AM -0500, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> Amirouche Boubekki writes:
> 
> > - port whoosh/lucene to guile to improve text search

Sorry, but I don't see the point of this. At least Lucene has a http-based
interface that can be accessed by any kind of client language. Why reinvent the
wheel (and, in the case of Lucene, a rather well working, extremly mature and
complex wheel)?
 
> This is something I'd love to see generally.  It would be nice to have
> an indexing library, either by writing bindings to Xapian (which
> unfortunately couldn't use the FFI since it's C++),

But almost all of Xapian's bindings are Swig-generated (and that seems to be
the prefered way of generating bindings). IIRC I used the Swig Guile bindings
years ago (I'm pretty shure that code got lost in a harddisk crash, but I'm to
lazy to google it up ...).
 
> or natively porting
> something like Whoosh, for Guile.

I've seen similar approaches for Common Lisp (search for montezuma) but in the
end it seems to be way too much work - remember that not a small part of Lucene's
success is based on the existing ecosystem (Solr, excellent language parsers et al.)

Cheers, Ralf Mattes


> If you write this as an independent library, let me know.  I'm a likely
> user.
> 
>  - Chris
>