Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Aiming To Improve Vim Performance With Vim9 Fork

Bram Moolenaar began developing Vim as an improvement over the Vi editor while now he is looking to make improvements over Vim itself with an experimental fork called Vim9.

Vim9 is an experimental fork of Vim that is principally focused on making Vim scripts execute faster and better to deal with. Vim9 is Bram's playground for Vim improvements with trying to make Vim scripts run faster. This comes after Vim 8.2 brought popup boxes and text properties for addressing the other leading requests for improvements to this text editor.

So far for a simple Vim script running a loop while Vim currently takes five seconds to run, the Vim9 code can run it in 0.07 seconds, about the same amount of time as a Lua script and quicker than Python. In a more relevant code snippet, Vim9 could run a script in 0.19 seconds compared to 0.85 seconds previously.

Those interested in this Vim9 performance work that will hopefully be folded back into Vim itself once proven can be found via Vim9 on GitHub.