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Comment by ecthiender | Hacker News Reader

To list few of the new features: Asynchronous I/O support, channels (Vim can now exchange messages with another process in the background asynchronously), Background jobs, timers, packages for plugins!

Wow! This is huge. So many interesting features landing on Vim 8.0.

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Async I/O, plus JSON is seriously enormous. I'm very excited for how much faster things will be, and I can imagine JSON support will definitely make integration just that much easier. My one minor gripe was plugin speed, as syntax highlighting, linting, etc. can take long enough to be jarring.

Exactly!

Async I/O? In a text editor, where the bulk of the time is spent waiting for the user to do something?

I've used (an older version of) Vim on huge 100MB+ files and never thought it to be slow at all. In fact I don't think I've ever experienced any lag with Vim. I suspect you won't find this new version any faster.

This is mostly about linters, makeprg's and things like Ctrl+P / Command+T, git-gutter etc.

I recently switched to NeoVim and it really _does_ make a world of difference, saving is a whole lot faster when git-diff can be performed asynchronously and the ability to scan directories in the background makes fuzzy searching of files a lot faster.

This is in fact fixing a massive pain point in vim, and one of the main reasons why NeoVIM has so much support. Saving a file in vim takes 1-2 seconds for me. Not because my disk is slow, but because I run some linters on my files, that take that long to all complete.

Async I/O is not about disk I/O, but communication with other programs.

I've opened 5GB files in Vim, on an average 2010 Ubuntu desktop. It took some time, like 5 minutes, but it worked.

Especially Syntastic. It's always a pain when every ":w" of a Ruby file hangs for 5 seconds during syntax checking because Ruby is so abysmally slow.

Five seconds?! Mine hangs for at most half a second (and I thought that was a lot). I almost don't even notice it anymore.

I get long hangs (5 secs) when saving Ruby code.

I think it just takes a long time to load up all the gems rubocop relies on, then to process the syntax. I put the blame squarely on Ruby, not vim.

Let's say these are five perceived seconds. The number might or might not be skewed by my passionate hatred of Ruby.

Yeah, Syntastic is my number one offender. I'd love to see Syntastic be able to just maintain a background server linting process (or several). I can imagine that alone, skipping all the environment loading/code parsing, would likely be good enough to make all but the longest files lint fast enough to be unnoticeable.

(Still worth it by far, though. I'll take a few seconds and nice error highlight over an hour of "Where the heck is my missing semicolon?")

> Asynchronous I/O support

I don't keep myself much up to date on these things, but wasn't this one of the main new features in NeoVim? (then code cleanup, then more language to script in)

Yes it was. And now Vim is getting those features as well.

Are they merging code from neovim, or is it a parallel implementation?

I think the former---from what I've heard neovim and vim are on very good relations, and here is the fruit of that.

Negative. NeoVim does away with supporting the ancient systems that are important to Bram for some reason. I seriously doubt they will merge.

Good relations =/=> must plan to unfork, at least in a post-git world.

Parallel. Bram (Vim maintainer) doesn't seem to like Thiago (Neovim lead dev).

Well except for the code cleanup and the more extensive scripting options ;)

I've been a happy neovim user for a few months now, but I'm still glad to see that vim is keeping itself up to date.

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