On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Marvin Humphrey <[email protected]> wrote: >> I think that Nick is right that the Perl-centric view of Lucy isn't >> helping us. Lucy is designed to be sleek and fast, things Perl >> decidedly is not. > > The code that runs while Lucy's Matchers are iterating is completely > disconnected from Perl. Perl is not a factor.
Yes, sometimes I even forget that the whole 'host-language' thing exists. But in the perception of the very few people who've heard of Lucy and realize it's not the faux-French pronunciation of Lucene, it's perceived as a Perl project: slow and unreadable. While I realize the innards are all in C and quite fast, outsiders do not. > There's also another factor we might consider. Clownfish is designed to be > paired with a dynamic language host, but thanks to Nick's efforts, it can now > be used standalone as well. We might want to offer a whole-application > compilation mode which is designed for maxing out performance in a > free-standing compiled application. I think running it standalone would be good. I love Perl, mind you, but it's a boat-anchor for branding. >> Do others think it's worthwhile to try to improve our reputation in this >> direction? > > Well, that's a funny way of putting it. I think it would be very worthwhile > to increase the speed of our Matchers -- but not for the sake of competing > with Lucene. Rather, it's worth doing for the sake of our users, or because > we love the engineering challenges of working on speed. I was indeed asking how much we care about the reputation as opposed to the actual performance. While benchmarking would be useful for performance improvements, it would be more effort to duplicate Lucene's benchmark than to use something smaller and focussed on the areas we'd like to improve. I have mixed feelings on raising our profile, but think it would be a benefit overall. I wondered what others thought. --nate
