Neovim News #11 - The Christmas Issue

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2021-07-13 06:30:03

The long-awaited release of Neovim v0.5.0 finally happened on July 2, 2021. It took longer than everybody had hoped for, but it was worth the wait: With over 4000 commits, it is so big that it broke some of the release tooling. So these notes will not be able to touch on each of the many changes that were made over the course of development and only focus on the most user-visible improvements, of which the biggest are

Neovim 0.5 went far in making Lua a first-class scripting language for Neovim, both for plugin development and for user configuration.

As a reminder, Lua is a small scripting language designed for embedding and is often used in, e.g., game development. Furthermore, there is a just-in-time compiler (LuaJIT, which Neovim is built with on platforms where it is available) that can provide impressive performance on relevant tasks. In essence, Lua was chosen over other languages because it is

For more details on this choice, see Justin M Keyes’ presentation at Vim Conf 2019 and TJ DeVries’ presentation at Vimconf.live.

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