[pylucene-dev] Announcing PyLucene 2.0

[Andi Vajda]

On Sat, 27 May 2006, tsuraan at tsuraan.net wrote:

> When you started writing your wrappers, did you consider the Boost.Python 
> system?  I'm considering it for some stuff of my own, but haven't looked at 
> it much.  Is there a glaring technical shortcoming that makes it unsuitable 
> for PyLucene (or other large projects), or did you just not want to introduce 
> excessive dependencies on PyLucene?

I did not consider Boost.Python or any other such package. The main motivation 
in de-swigging PyLucene was to get rid of a dependency. There are also some 
technical considerations that nudged me over, namely that it's not C++ that's 
being wrapped but Java that looks like C++ via CNI. Pointer ownership and 
dynamic typing is implemented by Java already, I didn't need SWIG to add its 
own version of that on top of it.
Over the past year, I got the opportunity to get very familiar with the 
python C type API and ultimately felt rather comfortable writing the wrappers 
by hand.
And finally, the amount of work in maintaining the SWIG interface in light of 
the constant changes in the SWIG package itself eventually exceeded the 
amount of work in writing the wrappers by hand once. The Java Lucene API is 
quite stable, after all.

Andi..