It goes without saying that 2020 was a tough year. While 2021 is getting better we are still not out of the woods yet. Sometimes the best way to get through it is to have a project that isn’t related to work but helps exercise the mind. Now I am not actually building a boat. My wife would kill me. However I am starting a project of similar ambition.

While granted I am a manager I still like to keep my development skills sharp. This is why I jump in to write code that helps my team reach their goals. This can range from everything from GO to Python. So for a personal project I don’t want to program in any of those.

Thus I am going to take a few open source projects and port them to Rust. I am gong document my experience and what works/doesn’t. Now I intent to do something a bit different for this port. I am going to use JNI to ensure the port is 100% compatible with the old one.

Choosing the right project

It goes without saying that there are plenty of open source projects. So here is the criteria I am using for selecting the right project to port.

• It should be an established project which is not radically changing. This will make maintenance of the port easer over time.
• It should have existing ports and the community should be open to new ports.
• It should be large but not so large that it can never be completed.
• It should be a project I am familiar with.

Based on this criteria I have decided to port the Lucene project. I have worked with Lucene on multiple projects back in the day. It will be good to revisit it and understand better how it works under the hood.