Query regarding GSoC

[James Aylett]

On 18 Jan 2017, at 15:51, Saurav Sachidanand <sauravsachidanand at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm a CS undergraduate studying in India, and I've had some experience working on a couple of open source projects [github.com/saurvs]. I'm interested in this org so I cloned the Xapian repo and built it on Arch Linux and I'm now looking at a bite-size task to do.

That's great — let us know if you need any help once you've picked up a task.

> I noticed that last year there was a GSoC project to write R bindings to Xapian's C++ API. I was wondering if there is any interest this year in writing Xapian bindings for the Julia programming language. It too is a language built primarily for technical computing with a growing but rich set of data science packages, and even generally exhibits better performance than R due to it's JIT compiler. The github.com/Keno/Cxx.jl or github.com/JuliaInterop/CxxWrap.jl package could be used in this project. If writing a Julia binding during GSoC would be a useful project for this community, I'd love to submit a proposal for it.

Definitely sounds like something we'd like to see. When you're thinking about the details, I'd suggest you look at the getting started guide, and see if it makes sense to wrap Xapian for Julia such that it could fit into that framework (so I guess having composite types mapping to Xapian classes in some fashion). If you think it doesn't make sense, we'd expect you to justify that in your proposal, in part because it means different documentation to all the other languages, which could make it harder to help people using it unless there's a Julia specialist around.

J

-- 
 James Aylett, occasional troublemaker & project governance
 xapian.org