[sword-devel] RIP CLucene on Mac Silicon

[Greg Hellings]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2025 at 1:56 PM Karl Kleinpaste <karl at kleinpaste.org> wrote:

> On 6/5/25 1:07 PM, Greg Hellings wrote:
>
> Sword has support for Xapian, I believe, which is a much more recent and
> up to date library
>
>
> Way back in November 2014, when Xapian's presence in Sword was new, I
> experimented with it. The problem I found is that its generated indices are
> absolutely humongous. At the time, I wrote to the list here to say that
> they were a 7x size increase, and that what was once a couple Gbytes had
> ballooned to 23.2Gbytes when I went through a round of mkfastmod for all my
> installed modules.
>

Running with just the KJV module just now, I have:

CLucene indexes the KJV in 12.5 seconds with a 12MB lucene directory
Xapian indexes KJV in 31 seconds with a 185MB xapian directory

It looks like it hasn't really gotten any better since your tests, Karl.


>
> I would reference this from sword-devel archives, but www.crosswire.org
> is failing to respond right now.
>

Apropos of none of the above, in order for mkfastmod to be able to make a
Xapian index, I had to apply the attached patch to the released Sword 1.9.0
as it was not updated when Xapian was first present as a target. Without
it, mkfastmod doesn't know that it can run and gives the error that search
frameworks are not supported.

I am also unable to pull up any of the crosswire.org site, so I don't know
if the patch is applied to trunk, but I would venture to guess not. Xapian
builds of Sword don't seem to be very popular so long as CLucene still
exists on Linux.

--Greg

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