The whole point of a search engine is getting you good results. Not alright result, or some random results in the wrong order, but the best possible results. Bench marking relevance is much more important than bench marking performance for search.
Lucene is a Swiss army knife for building you something to get you the best results possible. Those aren't enterprise features if you actually care about what your users do with search results. For example because your sales are directly correlated to that. The trick with Lucene is to do as much as you can possibly get away with as opposed to doing as little as you can do to call it a day that seems to be the strategy here for proving X is faster than Y with this particular benchmark. It's faster because it does less useful work.
The proof of concept here would be building something that is as good and as fast. By not even trying to benchmark how good things are, you kind of make the point that you either don't know or don't care enough to even bother to measure it.
Why did you offer lucene as a counterpoint, if you deny that there’s any equivalent implementation elsewhere that isn’t lucene? That just means lucene cannot be a counterpoint if it just so happens that the only implementation is in java.
Because people have been trying pretty hard to replicate what Lucene does in other languages specifically because they thought they could do a better job. The reason the Java implementation continues to dominate is that it being implemented in Java has repeatedly proven to be not as much of an issue as people assume it to be. At least not enough to matter.
And since the article is called "why C is faster than Java" and the main argument is literally "here's this thing implemented in C that is fast", it's an excellent counterpoint to go "here's this other thing in Java that is fast".
Sure, I would agree that lucene is “fast enough”. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be faster if implemented in another language, and I believe that tantivy demonstrates that it could be.
Lucene is a Swiss army knife for building you something to get you the best results possible. Those aren't enterprise features if you actually care about what your users do with search results. For example because your sales are directly correlated to that. The trick with Lucene is to do as much as you can possibly get away with as opposed to doing as little as you can do to call it a day that seems to be the strategy here for proving X is faster than Y with this particular benchmark. It's faster because it does less useful work.
The proof of concept here would be building something that is as good and as fast. By not even trying to benchmark how good things are, you kind of make the point that you either don't know or don't care enough to even bother to measure it.