Doug Cutting wrote:
Chuck Williams wrote:
I still don't understand why environments that are years behind in java
and most other apps should expect to be on the latest and greatest
lucene.
Yes, it is clear to me that you don't. The key thing is these people
are fellow members of the Lucene community and we should respect their
concerns even when we don't fully understand them. We want to avoid
forking and we want to avoid ill will.
GCJ is an important platform for Lucene. To the best of my knowledge,
Wikipedia's search uses Lucene on GCJ (at least it used to). Folks
who use Lucene from non-Java languages also use GCJ. Not having
access to new Lucene features and optimizations will burden folks who
use GCJ. GCJ's development lags Sun's substantially.
If I understood the discussion correctly, so far I haven't seen any
strong (compelling?) arguments for moving to 1.5 syntax apart from
purely aesthetic benefits. 'For' loops? Auto-boxing? Generics? Static
imports? This is just a dressing on the cake ... There are even tools
that can re-wire the bytecode so that it's 1.4-compatible again, which
shows how superficial these changes really are
(http://retroweaver.sourceforge.net/).
It's clearly not dictated by performance gains either - we can compile
1.4-compatible code using 1.5 compiler and run the binary on 1.5 JVMs,
getting exactly the same performance as if the source was 1.5-compatible ...
If we switched to 1.5 syntax, would PyLucene still work? I doubt it.
Would any well-entrenched WebSphere-based shops be ready to upgrade to
1.5? I doubt it too.
OTOH, I'm not stuck with any environment that really has no choice but
to use 1.4, so I personally cannot say that I must use 1.4. I have this
feeling also that if we allow (not require) 1.5 syntax we'll end up with
a code that has inconsistent style. From this point of view, it would be
better to make a switch once and for all, but at a later date, when 1.5
is so ubiquitous as 1.4 was when we made the conscious switch to use
java.util.* collections instead of Vectors and Hashtables.
So, it's -0.5 from me ... ;)
--
Best regards,
Andrzej Bialecki <><
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