While Lucy did start out as a C port of Lucene (hence the name), it's since broken any attempts at Lucene compatibility. Instead, it's aiming to be a fast and flexible standalone C core with bindings to higher level languages. Since it's growing out of Kinosearch, it's best developed bindings are in Perl, but support for all the usual suspects (Python, Ruby, etc.) is planned.
Technically, the main difference from Lucene is that it gets cozier with the machine: the OS is our VM. It's mostly mmap() IO, and we're very conscious of paging and cache issues. While we're trying to maintain 32-bit back compatibility, we take full advantage of 64-bit solutions when they offer themselves. The scripted bindings are also very cool --- you can do things like make callbacks to scoring methods in your script language to truly customize your results.
If for some reason you're not finding what you need in Lucene and Solr, check it out. We just became a full Apache incubator project, and are eager to get more developers involved. You'll find clean C code, decent documentation, and a low traffic but very responsive list. If you're using Perl, C or C++, you'll get a great product from the start. If you're using anything else, you'll have to help a lot on the bindings, but I think you'll be quite pleased with the end result.
While Lucy did start out as a C port of Lucene (hence the name), it's since broken any attempts at Lucene compatibility. Instead, it's aiming to be a fast and flexible standalone C core with bindings to higher level languages. Since it's growing out of Kinosearch, it's best developed bindings are in Perl, but support for all the usual suspects (Python, Ruby, etc.) is planned.
Technically, the main difference from Lucene is that it gets cozier with the machine: the OS is our VM. It's mostly mmap() IO, and we're very conscious of paging and cache issues. While we're trying to maintain 32-bit back compatibility, we take full advantage of 64-bit solutions when they offer themselves. The scripted bindings are also very cool --- you can do things like make callbacks to scoring methods in your script language to truly customize your results.
If for some reason you're not finding what you need in Lucene and Solr, check it out. We just became a full Apache incubator project, and are eager to get more developers involved. You'll find clean C code, decent documentation, and a low traffic but very responsive list. If you're using Perl, C or C++, you'll get a great product from the start. If you're using anything else, you'll have to help a lot on the bindings, but I think you'll be quite pleased with the end result.