Hi, I would like to try and improve concurrency in Lucene in several places, and thought I would start with FieldCacheImpl. The implementation is heavily synchronized on both a global map and on creation values for a pretty heavily used path (get). I think the weak hash map is a good solution (but also think that the ability to choose to use soft hash map would add even greater flexibility), the problem is that there is no built in concurrent weak/soft hash map. I have built several of these over the course of my Java life, but now, with google collections, I really don't think someone should build anything like this anymore.
I would like to take the task of doing this, I wanted to first check if the it is possible for lucene to have a dependency on google collections? Its apache licensed, and developed in cooperation with Doug Lea and basically considered as java.util valid extension with possible inclusion of some of the work into future JDK versions (and how know when those will come :) ). -shay.banon
