VIM 9.0 is officially released! The execution speed of the new script can be increased by up to 100 times

Produce | OSC The open source community （ID：oschina2013）

take Vim 9.0 Version dedicated to Sven Guckes, He is in 2022 year 2 The month passed away .Sven yes Vim Core maintainer of , He registered vim.org Domain name and created the first Vim Website , We will commemorate him with this .

After years of gradual improvement ,Vim Now there is an important version , A big step forward . In addition to many small additions and improvements , The focus of this release is Vim A new change in scripting language ：Vim9 Script.

The last version was 2019 year 12 Released on 8.2 edition . Because the latest source code will always be in GitHub The provision of , Therefore, many users have already installed the later patch version （ There are more than 5000 individual ）, These changes have been tried by many users . stay 8.2 On the basis of , Many errors have been fixed 、 The security problem has been solved , Code coverage has been greatly improved . This version is more reliable than any previous version .

Vim9 Script

Vim The script for has evolved over time , While preserving backward compatibility . This means that the wrong choices of the past often cannot be changed , And Vi Compatibility also limits possible solutions . So the execution speed is quite slow , Each row should be parsed at each execution .

Vim9 Script The main goal of is to dramatically improve performance . This is achieved by compiling commands into instructions that can be effectively executed , The speed of implementation is expected to increase 10 To 100 times .

Vim9 Script Our secondary goal is to avoid Vim Unique structure , Make it closer to common programming languages , Such as JavaScript、TypeScript and Java.

Performance can only be improved by not 100%  Backward compatibility . for example , By creating a "a:" Dictionaries make function parameters available with considerable overhead , stay Vim9 Function , This dictionary is no longer available .

For developers who have a lot of traditional scripts, don't worry too much , These scripts can still be used as before . There are currently no plans to abandon support for traditional scripts , Change will not be like Python 2 To Python 3 So violent .

Interesting features

To benefit from acceleration , A function must use  def  To define , Parameters and return types must be specified . This is not just to make execution faster , It also helps to detect errors early when functions are compiled into bytecode . Variables need to use  var  To declare the , And there is also a type , It can be specific , It can also be inferred from the assigned value .

The continuation of a line does not require the use of backslashes , This is the mechanism used in traditional scripts .

Function calls do not require  call, Assignment does not require  let, The expression does not need to be evaluated  eval. This makes Vim9 Script Looks more like most programming languages .

Breaking up a large script into smaller pieces is now much easier . In a script , export  Used to make specific functions and variables available to other scripts , Then use... Where you need to use the exported project  import. Combined with automatic loading mechanism , This provides a flexible and powerful way to implement large plug-ins .

Now comment with  #  start . The old double quotation mark grammar came from the old Vi, Will interfere with the use of strings . In many other languages , for example Python and shell Script , We all know  #  The meaning of .

Future work

stay Vim9 Script One of my plans is to add classes , Although you can use a dictionary to simulate , But this is far from ideal . Most programmers are familiar with classes , stay Vim9 Script Such things should also be added to , Currently the keyword has been reserved .

More details can be found at ：https://www.vim.org/vim90.php