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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad to see that Vim9 continues to make progress. The center of gravity may have shifted somewhat towards Neovim, but the Neovim ecosystem currently seems targeted towards people who want something more IDE-like.

One question is: will more plugin authors move to Vim9Script? It seems that Neovim users have generally moved towards Lua-based plugins, so there's less of a motivation to produce plugins that support both Neovim and Vim9.

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I'm not the target for your question (I distribute 0 plugins).

But Lua support in Neovim is the primary reason I moved over from Emacs. Elisp and Vim are both so heart sink for me.

That said I'd have preferred something other than Lua if I had the choice.

> That said I'd have preferred something other than Lua if I had the choice.

Same. I know we as a community would never agree on what that language should be, but in my dreams it would have been ruby. Even javascript would have been better for me than Lua.

> Even javascript would have been better for me than Lua.

Why?

Because I know javascript a lot more than I know Lua (and I suspect given js popularity, a lot of people are in the same boat). Yes Lua is easy to learn, but it's still different enough that there is friction. The differences also aren't just syntactically, it's also libraries/APIs, and more. I also don't have any need/use for Lua beyond neovim, so it's basically having to learn a language specifically for one tool. It's not ideal for me.

But the people who did the work wanted Lua, and I have no problem with that. That's their privilege as the people doing the work. I'm still free to fork it and make ruby or js or whatever (Elixir would be awesome!) first-class.

I agree but also wonder if editor plugins fall squarely in the range of things an LLM could vibe-code for me?

There is a large class of problems now for which I consider the chosen programming language to be irrelevant. I don't vibe code my driver code/systems programming stuff, but my helper scripts, gdb extensions, etc are mostly written or maintained by an LLM now.

I'm right there with you, and to be honest Lua just works. I helped with Neovim when it started ~10 years ago, and didn't understand the big deal about implementing lua.. But now that it's here, I can't believe it wasn't forked and implemented sooner

IME, Claude is quite good at generating Lua code for neovim. It takes some back and forth because there's no easy way for it to directly test what it's writing, but it works.

I vibe-coded a simple neovim lua plugin very recently. It worked well!

https://joeblu.com/blog/2026_01_introducing-nvim-beads-manag...

I was in the same boat, but you’d be surprised by the number of projects that have embedded lua. Zfs, nginx, redis, haproxy.

i’ve written probably north of a million lines of production js, maybe around 100,000 lines of production ruby, and about 300 lines of production lua. lua is a fun language and i think a much better fit than JS for technical reasons (who has a js engine that is both fast and embeds well? nobody), but i am certainly more productive in those other languages where i have more experience.

lua array index starting at 1 gets me at least once whenever i sit down to write a library for my nvim or wezterm.

> who has a js engine that is both fast and embeds well? nobody

Fabrice Bellard! https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs

(I agree with you, just wanted to note this super neat project)

quickjs/mquickjs are good at embedding but nowhere close to luajit in terms of speed. (i have some experience with quickjs https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten)

as an aside i’m curious how quickjs/mquickjs compares to mruby in speed and size. something to ponder

Lua, especially with LuaJIT, is nearly as fast as C. I certainly don't want to have to run a slow language like Ruby or especially a full blown JS runtime like V8 just to run Vim, the entire point is speed and keyboard ergonomics, otherwise just use VSCode.

Babashka! Super fast clojure/lisp.

there's always fennel for a lispy layer over lua

Quite a fair point! For intensive plugins and such, this would matter quite a bit.

Isn't LuaJIT kind of a dead end?

Also Ruby has been getting quite fast since YJIT (and now ZJIT):

https://railsatscale.com/2023-08-29-ruby-outperforms-c/

V8 is faster than LuaJIT. But sure, it has a large binary size.

You don't need V8 for running JS for scripting, you have quickjs[1] or mquickjs[2] for example. You might have problems importing npm packages, but as we can see from lua plugins you don't even need support for package managers. Performance is not as good as luajit, but it is good enough

[1]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/

[2]: https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs

I don’t want npm anywhere near my tooling thanks.

  >  a full blown JS runtime

I absolutely hate all the random things that install npm on my machines

Doesn't Vim support extensions written in several languages? Or was that removed in Vim 9?

It still does, but those only work with a Vim built that has those interfaces compiled in.

I wish they supported Janet

Can you run Fennel in Neovim? It's a Lisp running on Lua. https://fennel-lang.org/

Yes.

Yep! and I already do: https://github.com/Grazfather/dotfiles/tree/master/nvim/fnl

> That said I'd have preferred something other than Lua if I had the choice.

Denops is super easy to use, works great. Connects over RPC. https://github.com/vim-denops/denops.vim

Nvim-oxi is wild. Uses neovim's FFI to let you write Rust that talks directly to neovim. https://github.com/noib3/nvim-oxi

Denops has always been a niche but it was a really popular niche for a couple years. Activity is fading somewhat. I'm still doing my plugin dev in lua, and it's... survivable. But I do think of switching more into one of these options.

I love vim9script and write most of my plugins in it now unless I want something to work in the other vim as well, of course. Really happy to see it evolving and I'm particularly happy that tuple support has landed!

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