Why aren't there other vim committers?
Bram's conservatism makes perfect sense for someone who has to maintain this huge, consequential, intimidating codebase. Why hasn't he gotten some help?
Bram's conservatism makes perfect sense for someone who has to maintain this huge, consequential, intimidating codebase. Why hasn't he gotten some help?
Nevertheless, people still try. A lot of them fail, a few succeed.
The vim code base is around 300K lines of C code. I'm sure its nothing like Java where 90% of the code is get/set methods, high level delegating classes and exception handling code. 300K lines of code which does the actual work is simply too much code. And one should exercise great caution while dealing with it. Regression is just one thing, I'm sure there are a lot of places in the code which can silently break things you can't detect only to pop up in some strange case in the wild.
I found this hard to believe, so I ran it through cloc:
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Language files blank comment code
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C 113 33366 61819 285817
vim script 1186 22871 32599 145700
C/C++ Header 63 3175 4626 19735
300K lines of code which does the actual work is simply too much code. And one should exercise great caution while dealing with it. Regression is just one thing, I'm sure there are a lot of places in the code which can silently break things you can't detect only to pop up in some strange case in the wild.
In a way, it's like a direct application of the style in /The C Programming Language/.