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Vim releases Vim 9.0, new scripting language a thousand times faster

Little by little, Vim has become an essential source code editor since it was born more than three decades ago. An editor made by and for programmers that greatly facilitates the work of these professionals thanks to its ways of editing, compiling and correcting. One of its great attractions is that it facilitates carry out the different tasks thanks to its key combinations and the possibility of using macrosleaving aside the mouse and the tools menu.

However, even the most established projects need to update and offer new features to their large group of users, which is why Vim releases a new scripting language: Vim Script 9.0, a scripting language up to 1000 times faster. And we have to go back almost two years ago to find the last release of Vim, it was version 8.2 in December 2019. But since the most recent source code is available on GitHub, many programmers have acquired more updated and powerful later versions. . During all this time, Vim has been able to correct existing logical errors, solve security problems, carry out hundreds of tests… and launch this new scripting language.

This is Vim 9.0 script

There is no doubt that the objective of this new version is to improve its performance since the previous versions suffered from an exasperating slowness for the programmers. So with Vim 9.0, the speed is increased from 10 to 100 times. Though It has also been used to approach the most common programming languages -its most direct competition- such as Python, Java, JavaScript and TypeScript and not give as much importance to Vim’s own specifications.

Vim 9.0 will continue to count with its applauded internal scripting language or Vimscript which makes it very easy to automate complex tasks, create extensions and language support, among other things. However, one of the differences with respect to the previous version is found in the differentiation between local versus global variables and functions, where functions defined with :def will be compiled before being executedleaving aside having to process the function’s arguments as associative arrays, which itself causes a lot of overhead.

Another novelty of Vim 9.0 is found at the time of split expressions on multiple lines that no longer require backslashes; a completely redesigned error handling mechanism; functions do not require the keyword call to run, but let to assign values; comments now start with #, the old double quote syntax interferes with the way strings are used, plus other minor differences in error handling.

For those programmers with a large collection of legacy scripts, there won’t be any type of problem since it will continue working as before. At this time, Vim has no plans to remove support for the legacy script.

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