Tantivy's creator built a search engine that now outruns Lucene in places

A Conversation with Paul Masurel, Creator of Tantivy

Paul Masurel started Tantivy in 2016 on a flight from Tokyo to Paris, testing Rust on a real project after years of Lucene-based search work at Indeed. The modular, library-only design borrowed from Lucene turned out to be its greatest asset: Quickwit, ParadeDB, LNX, and Turso now build on it. A reproducible benchmark showed Tantivy often twice as fast as Lucene, sparking a genuine collaboration in which Lucene patches closed most of the gap.