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by jasonhansel7 hours ago |
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upvoteby sodapopcan5 hours ago|
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I love vim9script and write most of my plugins in it now unless I want something to work in the other vim as well, of course. Really happy to see it evolving and I'm particularly happy that tuple support has landed!
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upvoteby rustyhancock7 hours ago|
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I'm not the target for your question (I distribute 0 plugins).

But Lua support in Neovim is the primary reason I moved over from Emacs. Elisp and Vim are both so heart sink for me.

That said I'd have preferred something other than Lua if I had the choice.

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upvoteby freedomben6 hours ago|
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> That said I'd have preferred something other than Lua if I had the choice.

Same. I know we as a community would never agree on what that language should be, but in my dreams it would have been ruby. Even javascript would have been better for me than Lua.

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upvoteby satvikpendem6 hours ago|
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Lua, especially with LuaJIT, is nearly as fast as C. I certainly don't want to have to run a slow language like Ruby or especially a full blown JS runtime like V8 just to run Vim, the entire point is speed and keyboard ergonomics, otherwise just use VSCode.
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upvoteby comex3 hours ago|
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V8 is faster than LuaJIT. But sure, it has a large binary size.
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upvoteby freedomben6 hours ago|
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Quite a fair point! For intensive plugins and such, this would matter quite a bit.
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upvoteby user39393826 hours ago|
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Babashka! Super fast clojure/lisp.
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upvoteby zem6 hours ago|
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there's always fennel for a lispy layer over lua
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upvoteby lloeki4 hours ago|
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Isn't LuaJIT kind of a dead end?

Also Ruby has been getting quite fast since YJIT (and now ZJIT):

https://railsatscale.com/2023-08-29-ruby-outperforms-c/

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upvoteby elros6 hours ago|
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> Even javascript would have been better for me than Lua.

Why?

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upvoteby freedomben6 hours ago|
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Because I know javascript a lot more than I know Lua (and I suspect given js popularity, a lot of people are in the same boat). Yes Lua is easy to learn, but it's still different enough that there is friction. The differences also aren't just syntactically, it's also libraries/APIs, and more. I also don't have any need/use for Lua beyond neovim, so it's basically having to learn a language specifically for one tool. It's not ideal for me.

But the people who did the work wanted Lua, and I have no problem with that. That's their privilege as the people doing the work. I'm still free to fork it and make ruby or js or whatever (Elixir would be awesome!) first-class.

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upvoteby 011000116 hours ago|
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I agree but also wonder if editor plugins fall squarely in the range of things an LLM could vibe-code for me?

There is a large class of problems now for which I consider the chosen programming language to be irrelevant. I don't vibe code my driver code/systems programming stuff, but my helper scripts, gdb extensions, etc are mostly written or maintained by an LLM now.

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upvoteby metrix5 hours ago|
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I'm right there with you, and to be honest Lua just works. I helped with Neovim when it started ~10 years ago, and didn't understand the big deal about implementing lua.. But now that it's here, I can't believe it wasn't forked and implemented sooner
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upvoteby maleldil2 hours ago|
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IME, Claude is quite good at generating Lua code for neovim. It takes some back and forth because there's no easy way for it to directly test what it's writing, but it works.
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upvoteby jitl6 hours ago|
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i’ve written probably north of a million lines of production js, maybe around 100,000 lines of production ruby, and about 300 lines of production lua. lua is a fun language and i think a much better fit than JS for technical reasons (who has a js engine that is both fast and embeds well? nobody), but i am certainly more productive in those other languages where i have more experience.

lua array index starting at 1 gets me at least once whenever i sit down to write a library for my nvim or wezterm.

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upvoteby llimllib6 hours ago|
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> who has a js engine that is both fast and embeds well? nobody

Fabrice Bellard! https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs

(I agree with you, just wanted to note this super neat project)

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upvoteby jitl6 hours ago|
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quickjs/mquickjs are good at embedding but nowhere close to luajit in terms of speed. (i have some experience with quickjs https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten)

as an aside i’m curious how quickjs/mquickjs compares to mruby in speed and size. something to ponder

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upvoteby MarsIronPI6 hours ago|
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Doesn't Vim support extensions written in several languages? Or was that removed in Vim 9?
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upvoteby chrisbra806 hours ago|
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It still does, but those only work with a Vim built that has those interfaces compiled in.
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upvoteby Graziano_M6 hours ago|
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I wish they supported Janet
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upvoteby nine_k6 hours ago|
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Can you run Fennel in Neovim? It's a Lisp running on Lua. https://fennel-lang.org/
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