For better or worse they awoke the sleeping giant[1]. Curious to see how things play out with the fork (i.e. will vim users stay put or move on to neovim in the coming months/years).
It's unfortunate that vim introduced similar features for managing running processes, but in a completely incompatible way, such that one vim module can't easily support both.
I'm not sure how it could be 'for worse'? Even Neovim benefits from the uptick in Vim patches, because they actually merge many of them into Neovim. So it seems like it can only be a good thing. Better editors for everyone.
That's one way it could play out, but that's not the way it did play out. Vim ate Neovim's lunch because they took so long to create a release that Vim was able to copy their best features. Worse yet, they did this in a way that is not compatible with Neovim. There is a chasm between Vim and Neovim that is growing, and the incentive to cross it is shrinking.
As someone who has watched closely Neovim's development since its announcement, and used it as my daily text editor for literal years, I feel sad to say that it is early-stage vapourware. They kicked vim into action, then vim kicked them out of it.
Hm, ok, that's interesting. I guess I stopped following Vim's progress once I switched to Neovim. It still seems to me that Neovim has the right overall approach (through cleanup, shedding ancient compatibility layers), but if that doesn't yield an increase in velocity in the short term then I guess it wouldn't be a big advantage.
Vim didn't eat Neovim's lunch. It made its own lunch. Vim8's async feature is a copy only in name. Comparing both async APIs, I'm almost certain that Vim8's was added spitefully. It's just so obtuse compared to Neovim's.
Well, that one is the one people are using. Now that the question among plugin developers is "Vim or Neovim?" which one do you think they will choose? It's totally possible that Neovim will need to adopt Vim's inferior API for compatibility reasons, like they're doing with the VimL<->Lua compatibility layer.
The same question can be asked about Vim 7.4 and Vim 8.0. Which should a plugin developer choose to support? I'm a plugin developer and choose to support any version that has the right features for what I'm accomplishing. For most things, there isn't anything special that needs to be done.