Re: Fuzzy search

[Olly Betts <olly@...>]

Yuri Takhteyev <yuri@sims.berkeley.edu> writes:
> Or, you could do a Lua binding on an an off-the-shelf search library
> that already does indexing, stemming, spelling correction, synonym
> expansion etc.  Xapian comes to mind.  I imagine that many other Lua
> projects could benefit from a Xapian binding.  I know I would use it
> in my wiki.

If anyone is interested in working on Lua bindings for Xapian, feel free
to ask for help on the Xapian mailing lists.  I don't think any of the active
Xapian developers have much Lua expertise, but we're happy to provide
assistance with the Xapian and SWIG side.  What you need to have is a good
knowledge of Lua and motivation for producing a good quality set of bindings.

I'd suggest using SWIG is the best approach - the killer advantage is
that most new C++ features will get wrapped automatically for languages
which use SWIG.

There's a bit of useful information here:

http://svn.xapian.org/trunk/xapian-bindings/HACKING?revision=HEAD&view=markup

Quoting from there:

   To give an idea of how much work a set of bindings might be, the author of
   the Ruby bindings estimated they took about 25 hours, starting from not
   knowing SWIG.  However, the time taken could vary substantially depending
   on the language, how well you know it, and how well SWIG supports it.

Cheers,
    Olly (a Xapian developer)