[Xapian-devel] C API

[Peter Karman]

Hi.

I am one of the developers of Swish-e (http://swish-e.org/), an indexing/search 
tool similar to Xapian.

I am currently researching future development directions for the Swish-e 
project. Three of our most often-requested features are UTF-8 support, 
incremental indexing, and large (multimillion) doc sets, all of which seem to be 
ably handled in the Xapian library.

So one possible direction for us might be to use the Xapian db as our backend. 
Swish-e would be much like Omega in that regard, except that we use libxml2 to 
parse HTML/XML, etc., along with some other features like defining which 
characters constitute a "word" and so forth.

My question is whether there exists a C API for Xapian, or more precisely, 
whether anyone has successfully used Xapian from within a C program. I realize 
that it is possible to use C++ libraries with C, but at a cursory glance, it 
doesn't look as if the xapian-core C++ source is defined with 'extern "C"' or 
any of the other common access points for C programs. A change to Swish-e to use 
Xapian would mean a total re-write for Swish-e, so we could do C++, but it would 
be good to know that upfront.

All thoughts appreciated.

cheers,
-- 
Peter Karman  .  http://peknet.com/  .  peter at peknet.com