After many years of gradual improvement Vim now takes a big step with a major release. Besides many small additions the spotlight is on a new incarnation of the Vim script language: Vim9 script.

One of Neovim’s major draws is that you can avoid Vim script altogether and use Lua instead. It looks like the Vim team is addressing the two major complaints folks have with Vim script: performance and its obscure syntax:

The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.

A secondary goal is to avoid Vim-specific constructs and get closer to commonly used programming languages, such as JavaScript, TypeScript and Java.

Legacy scripts will continue to work, of course. The Vim team has no plans to drop legacy support in the foreseeable future. Learn more about Vim9 script here or with :help vim9 inside Vim itself.