Re: Followup: opinions on Search services

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> > Indexing large files requires dynamic allocation of large amounts of 
> > memory hence my opinion that garbage collected languages are not optimal 
> > for this situation. Im not a luddite and I do like both python and C# 
>
>
> The above is not true, you only need a few buffers to index it.
>
> Let me illustrate with an example:
>
> 	"To index a 1 gigabyte file, do I need 1 gigabyte of memory?"
>
> Clearly if your answer is `yes', then you are not the most astute
> programmer, nor the sharpest knife in the drawer.

No but depending on how its implemented you still have to filter the 
file into plain text and then generate a unique word list from it. This 
word list can potentially be quite large for large files and would 
occupy a fair amount of memory.

> > and I would certainly use them for GUI stuff over C anyday. However for 
> > a back end service that is  both CPU and memory intensive I maintain 
> > that IMHO C in this particular case is a better choice.
>
>
> Luckily, your ideology does not match reality.

It is debatable. If your reality is modern machines with tons of ram 
then yes but for others less fortunate...

> As Beagle and the extensive set of applications built with Lucene in
> Java and .NET prove they are adequate languages for the task (and there
> is now this distributed open source search engine built with Java as
> well).

If they can do so efficiently then great (let me know when Beagle has 
reached that point).  Your next hurdle will be to convince Gnome and KDE 
to adopt it (ie become a freedesktop standard) cause it will be very sad 
if I end up having to run two different indexers/metadata crawlers 
concurrently for my mixed Gnome/KDE system.

jamie.

> Miguel.
>
> Miguel