Happy birthday!

[Bram Moolenaar]

Hello Vim users,

29 years ago the very first version of Vim was built and distributed.
And Vim is more popular than ever before! So, what's going on these days?


VIM 9 DEVELOPMENTS - MAKING VIM SCRIPT FASTER AND EASIER TO USE

This is a big project. A lot of progress has been made, but it will
take time until we'll have "version 1.0". To make it possible to
compile a Vim script function, so that it can be executed 10-100 times
faster, it was required to make changes that are not backwards
compatible. Such as not having a dictionary and list for the function
arguments, since that causes too much overhead for every function call.

Once making changes that are not backwards compatible, it seemed like a
good idea to also make it easier to use Vim script. Or in other words:
"less weird". Using keywords and syntax that is similar to popular
programming languages helps a lot. At the same time we can make the
semantics more predictable and avoid mistakes. Type checking is a great
help with that, especially when writing a large plugin.

In case you don't like Vim 9 script, you can keep using the legacy one,
it won't go away and remain backwards compatible.


RELIABILITY - MAKING SURE VIM NEVER FAILS

The functionality included with Vim for testing has been greatly
improved. Besides unit testing, it is now also possible to write
screendump tests. That is especially useful for highlighting and
dynamic behavior, such as with completion.

We now have continuous integration on three platforms. Neither of them
is perfect, but together it gives very good coverage of systems and
variations in configuration. The main challenge is to avoid flaky
tests.

Source code coverage is now at 88.75%. It keeps increasing, although
it's getting harder to cover the last few lines, especially related to
running out of memory. We have also several people running fuzzers and
other tools to uncover problems.

I dare to say that Vim is more reliable than ever before. Thanks to
everybody who helped with that.

Happy Vimming!


--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
178. You look for an icon to double-click to open your bedroom window.

/// Bram Moolenaar -- Br...@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
/// sponsor Vim, vote for features -- http://www.Vim.org/sponsor/ \\\
\\\ an exciting new programming language -- http://www.Zimbu.org ///
\\\ help me help AIDS victims -- http://ICCF-Holland.org ///