The main devs of NeoVim offered to work out an api for both versions but it never happend.
Seems like we are now in a feature war between both lets see who comes out winning. This whole thing could have happend so much smoother for the community but stubbornness sometimes lead to interesting innovations :).
If anyone is curious, here is the thread in question where the vim async API was proposed and the neovim devs proposed collaboration and were shut down without actually looking at the details:
There are lots of other instances of this exact interaction between neovim and vim over and over, it's infuriating. Neovim was started precisely for this reason, an async proposal was made (in 2014!!) which was rudely shut down and all efforts of collaboration were ignored.
I'm sorry, but Thiago's response is clearly patronising. Giving Bram advice on how to "properly" implement channels and job control. Suggesting taking the old infamous old patch.
I got pissed off for Bram reading it.
Also Bram had much more detailed and valid criticism about neovim's implementation above the response you linked. Did you intentionally link that one to make Bram look bad or did you simply not read the whole thread? I'm betting on the former.
Thiago's response comes from several years of experience actually doing and having done what Bram what proposing: first creating the async path for vim, fighting for its acceptance, then forking vim, implementing it, and shepherding it as the key feature of neovim. So far, I've heard no major complaints about neovim's async; it's actually been the killer feature so far.
Bram might be the more experienced programmer overall, but for implementing async in vim, I'll take Thiago's learned opinion over Bram's 'the horse has been dragged to water' solution anyday.
I wasn't talking about Thiago's credentials. I was talking about the tone in his reply which was clearly abrasive.
Brams criticism is valid about Thiago solution. Forcing msgpack is less than ideal. It's clear Thiago is learning as he goes along. Taking his work without reflection would be silly.
Also it is also clear neovim wants plugin writers. So they want vim to be compatible with what they made so they can grab users.
Why should vim care about being compatible with neovim?
I don't agree with your reading of Thiago's tone--you found it patronising, I found it trying hard to be polite to Bram, who's being the same dismissive senior dev he was when he rejected Thiago's first and second attempts at patches to do what was done very well in neovim.
As for why vim should care? Because at this point I'd put money on neovim as the long term winner, and if I were Bram, I'd worry about vim joining vi on the sidelines as 'still developed, still in use, but not the vi everyone uses when they log into a linux box'. I'd look at my codebase and neovim's, at my toolchain and neovim's, at my community and neovim's, at my velocity and neovim's, and I'd imagine neovim eclipsing vim over time.
Maybe that's fine. But Bram is hardly some god-king who's position as foremost developer in the vi universe is a lifetime appointment--especially after he took that position from Bill Joy.
Neovim already fragmented the community. Bram seems to have stepped up to the challenge bigtime since neovim announcement, as judged by his github activity graph.
I wouldn't say he's stepped up. It's all a reactionary response to Neovim. I dont think we'd ever have async in vim if it weren't for the neovim project.
That being said I hope they pull an io.js and merge taking the best of both vim and neovim, whatever that may be.
you know what? I'm prepared to cut Bram Moolenaar a lot of slack given the goodness he gave us for 20 years through 7 versions of one of my top 3 pieces of useful software.
but move on from what exactly? Vim 8? Looks good to me....
Maybe you want to move on just for the sake of moving on? To a new generation? Can you explain why? Seems to me that the person who knows the code base 200%, who wrote/vetted the entire codebase, is better placed to add features, than newbie refactorers who didn't?
neovim will most likely merge good features from vim 8, but I find unlikely that the opposite happens. To be fair, I'm actually okay with that. One of the reasons neovim is where it is right now is because they forked it and because they keep it forked. I'm not sure how fast it would improve if neovim merged back.
Well, at this point in time Amiga and MS DOS should probably go.
They're served decently enough by older versions and I doubt that any machine running those has the resources for features provided by newer Vim versions. Even if they do, the OS support for these features might not be good enough.
If you know how vim-dispatch works, you'll know that it just opens up a split in Tmux/Screen or makes a new tab/window in your terminal emulator to run the command "asynchronously." While it does work, it's definitely a hack and not a feature of Vim.
Right. Frankly that's a disappointing response. One source software shouldn't be a competition. I'm still holding out for some kind of grand unification in the future. I'm sure this is becoming a nightmare for plug-in maintainers, because it's certainly a pain in the ass for users like me.
Seems like we are now in a feature war between both lets see who comes out winning. This whole thing could have happend so much smoother for the community but stubbornness sometimes lead to interesting innovations :).