The upcoming 0.5 release will feel like a rewrite to some folks though, the entire config system is Lua-first right down to support of an init.lua instead of init.vim in vimscript. I've been converting my setup over to Lua and it's so much more understandable and sane vs. some bespoke scripting language that made more sense in 1990.

(it should also be mentioned the old vimscript support isn't going away, you can still use old configs)

No, but it tackles the same aforementioned issues:

> opaque maintenance/contributions, poor performance inherited from core design decisions made decades ago, the burden of backwards compatibility for legacy systems, etc.

The main goal of NeoVim is to ditch the backwards compatibility and simplify the codebase. Sure, it isn't a from-scratch rewrite, but it's a very deep fork.

>Sure, it isn't a from-scratch rewrite, but it's a very deep fork.

Not really. I contribute to Neovim and in my experience the architecture is the same as in Vim. The features that were added in Neovim first do have a different architecture and are better designed though. However these new features only make a tiny fraction of all of Vim's features.

The magic of it is it just keeps on working. All those big changes didn't cause any instability for even once.