Hm, ok, that's interesting. I guess I stopped following Vim's progress once I switched to Neovim. It still seems to me that Neovim has the right overall approach (through cleanup, shedding ancient compatibility layers), but if that doesn't yield an increase in velocity in the short term then I guess it wouldn't be a big advantage.
Vaporware?! That's atrociously uncharitable. Care to defend that characterization? Did you call Gmail vaporware until they took the 'Beta' label out?
Re:Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road
by tommyallen on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @04:52PM
(#13118657)
Vim didn't eat Neovim's lunch. It made its own lunch. Vim8's async feature is a copy only in name. Comparing both async APIs, I'm almost certain that Vim8's was added spitefully. It's just so obtuse compared to Neovim's.
Well, that one is the one people are using. Now that the question among plugin developers is "Vim or Neovim?" which one do you think they will choose? It's totally possible that Neovim will need to adopt Vim's inferior API for compatibility reasons, like they're doing with the VimL<->Lua compatibility layer.
Re:Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road
by tommyallen on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @12:11AM
(#13120605)
The same question can be asked about Vim 7.4 and Vim 8.0. Which should a plugin developer choose to support? I'm a plugin developer and choose to support any version that has the right features for what I'm accomplishing. For most things, there isn't anything special that needs to be done.
As someone who has watched closely Neovim's development since its announcement, and used it as my daily text editor for literal years, I feel sad to say that it is early-stage vapourware. They kicked vim into action, then vim kicked them out of it.