| > Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch. I can clearly see the benefit of this old wisdom under context of limited resource and limited time, esp. in a commercial company. However, as an experimental, personal(?), non-profit, free/open-source project, I do think neovim has value in its own right: 1. It won't affect any existing plan of vim, and won't change any existing code in vim. We can still happily use vim as usually.
2. If it succeeded, then we would have another powerful free/open source editor in our community.
3. If it failed, then we as a community have nothing to lose. The author might be unhappy then, but he would at least gain lots of experience. There are so many rewritings happen in this community, and they are definitely good things: - svn is a rewriting of cvs, and git is a totally new one (with more features?) written from scratch.
- nginx was written even if there's apache httpd
- There's zookeeper, but people wrote etcd
- etc. |
In an OSS context, money is not always the biggest mover, and doing this might actually succeed, or at least not fail because the company fails. It certainly may be that the people lose interest before it gets anywhere, but who cares! The only reason that I could see is that someone wants to fold all their code changes back into vim's original codebase, and they both seem to have different end goals, so eventually they will drift away from each other.
Code evolution.