Lucene.NET's new future and status update

I'm happy to say we are on the right path to be releasing a new version of Lucene.NET soon. We are now working on a version compatible with Java Lucene 4.8.0. This is huge, and if you have been following Lucene you should already know why. If you haven't, I will be blogging on various features this provides later this year.

So around September last year (that is, 2014) we received a very helpful code contributions from Microsoft. Essentially it enabled us to renew our efforts porting the latest Java Lucene to the CLR. We have been hard at work ever since to finish the porting process and make all tests pass.

Recently more good people joined our efforts, including yet another team in Microsoft, and things are looking very good. We still have about 200 failing tests to fix in the core (out of ~2300!) and a few relatively smaller sub-projects to complete porting. But we now have this under control.

Where we are headed

There's quite a lot still left to do, also after porting is complete.

Just like Apache Java Lucene, we are relying heavily on randomized testing. This has many subtleties that need proper addressing in the testing framework, and we are not there yet. But when we are done there, it will mean a much more stable and testable Lucene.NET.

We will also want, and need, to properly test Lucene.NET and ensuring it 100% compatible with Java Lucene. I suspect this will require its own testing framework.

There's also the question of Mono / Linux support, Azure support, running on mobile devices and various opportunities for performance tweaking. There's probably more, but that's enough at this stage!

Yes, we do have lots of ground to cover.

Asking for help

If you read all the way through here you are probably interested in Lucene, or you are invested in Lucene.NET one way or another.

In case you are willing to help by contributing code, please read this contributor's guide. We will be happy to have more hands on deck, whatever your specialty is.

Otherwise, I'm looking for ways to dedicate more time on this, but as I'm self-employed it is usually means trading and a paid work day with an OSS day. If your company will be willing to sponsor some work days to enable me to focus on Lucene.NET for a while, I will be most grateful.

You know how to reach me.