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by tpope 4457 days ago
So, the overhead I'm referring to isn't so much stuff like function dispatch (which is almost immeasurable with the heavy lifting happening in C), but idiomatic overhead. Creating an anonymous function to map across a lazy sequence wrapping a persistent data structure doesn't have a chance in hell against a native for loop on a native vim list. I actually did quite a bit of optimization in this area (that's where chunked seqs came from), and it's quite usable for many tasks, but it's still potentially bottlenecking so I never really found myself "trusting" it for anything significant.

Of course, I am in a rather unique position of being able to bang out well optimized VimL in my sleep, so paradoxically that biases me against my own creation.
2 comments
lloeki 4457 days ago
> Creating an anonymous function to map across a lazy sequence wrapping a persistent data structure doesn't have a chance in hell against a native for loop on a native vim list

... until this thing actually gets traction and one decides to integrate a native TimL interpreter into vim alongside VimL (making this implementation a shim for older versions). Of course this would create two competing standards (until vim 8?) but the more than reasonable out of the box interop and readily available usefulness and unleashed power (you mentioned macros to alleviate pain points) makes it a honestly very reasonable scenario compared to python/ruby/lua bindings, which are honestly foreign and require an external dependency.

All of this is a sign of a brilliant hack: immediately useful despite having to bear with some caveats, with a clear path towards the future. Thank you sir.

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eridius 4457 days ago
I considered talking about the idiomatic angle, but I know very little about Clojure, and not much more about VimL, so I erred on the side of not listing that.

I am curious how much optimization TimL has. I haven't had a chance to actually look at it beyond the README (and I don't know if I'd understand anything if I did). Does it leverage an existing Clojure compiler, complete with optimizations, and treat VimL as a target architecture? Or is it closer to an AST transformation with all optimizations being hand-written for TimL?

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