Hi, and thanks! Well, there's no need to re-invent the wheel, and there already exist fast implementations of DL distance. However, Damerau-Levenshtein distance is just one piece of our string comparison evaluation system that is built in-house and is constantly under development and improvement.

For example, another important aspect of the comparison metrics is our in-house phonetics library that we've built to be sensitive to vowel context, syllabification, diphthongs, stemming and lemmatization, and other language phenomena, and we are fleshing it out to handle other languages including some Eastern European and CJK.