I haven't noticed any performance issues in vim to start with. It was fast on a 75MHz pentium for me. The syntax highlighting, same. No issues. I don't always use that though because I can't be bothered to set up anything much past the basic config.
replyAt one point vim lacked asynchronous plugins. If a plugin was running a builder or linter it locked the editor up (from what I recall).
replyThat fell apart when people wanted vim to do some more modern IDE kind of things like all the “… on save” stuff (build on save, test, lint, etc). I think LSP support is native in neovim as well.
I believe vim merged asynchronous plugin support a while back though, so I’m not sure how different they really are anymore.
That seems like solving the wrong problem.
replyJust run make from another terminal...
It was a real problem, but as GP already mentioned, Vim has integrated some version of it since Vim 8 (2016), probably at least somewhat motivated by NeoVim (forked 2014).
replyI hadn't noticed.
replyIIRC vim became really slow with the combination of large source files (thousands of lines of code) and language server plugins (e.g. code completion and live error squiggles).
replyI had a C program that was a single file 140,000 lines long back then. No issues.
replyI was using vim-enhanced as red hat-based distro installed it. No customization. No customization of nvim either.
replyI often use vim or nvim on disposable machines, so persistent undo is something very low on my list of things I want.
Tree-sitter is more performant for sure, and its potential for easier text objects is nice. However, Vim's syntax engine is more than good enough for non-complex highlighting (and many people don't want complex highlighting) and, while I don't have enough tree-sitter knowledge to explain this myself, I've seen examples of Lua versions of Vim plugins where tree-sitter is unable to handle some of the regex-based text objects present in the vimscript version.
replyAs far as really cool uses for tree-sitter go, ast-grep is a fantastic tool. Of course it's a standalone program, so it doesn't need nvim to make use of it.