The whole approach makes a lot of sense. Successful refactoring goes hand in hand with setting up a test environment. Code that is not covered by unit tests is legacy code. Without tests, you have to fear breaking things and fear is a bad starting point for development.
I backed Neovim and I really hope that it succeeds. I think the Vim codebase is criticized a little too harshly in general. It is a child of its time.
Whether Lua is the optimal choice as an extension language remains to be seen, yet it is a very pragmatic choice and over time we will see that the C core of vim will shrink dramatically.
I seriously hope that Bram Molenaar is not offended by the fork (and I think he is not). For the vim community having neovim as an independent development line will have its merrits until it is clear whether the fork can replace the proven editor.
I backed Neovim and I really hope that it succeeds. I think the Vim codebase is criticized a little too harshly in general. It is a child of its time.
Whether Lua is the optimal choice as an extension language remains to be seen, yet it is a very pragmatic choice and over time we will see that the C core of vim will shrink dramatically.
I seriously hope that Bram Molenaar is not offended by the fork (and I think he is not). For the vim community having neovim as an independent development line will have its merrits until it is clear whether the fork can replace the proven editor.