[RFC] Possible performance improvements using neovim Live Updates

[phodge]

Hello! A friend showed me your Chromatica plugin which looks like it has a lot of potential. Personally I'm very excited to see some new async Syntax engines since vim's :syntax commands haven't kept up with what other modern editors can do.

I also had plans to write an external syntax engine for neovim, but first I wanted to deal with the problem of how to efficiently feed text changes into the external parser. I have made a working patch to neovim which solves this problem: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/5269

I would love to hear your thoughts on that PR I have submitted, and whether you think it would help your Chromatica plugin, because the PR was specifically designed to help with plugins such as yours.

The docs I wrote should hopefully be enough to explain how the new feature works and give you an idea as to whether it would be useful for you or not: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/5269/files#diff-f87461134f13a9308795c382e03cbfa8

[arakashic]

This is quite interesting. I will definitely give it a try. Thanks for letting me know.

[justinmk]

Note that the PR mentioned above was merged as https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/7917, and that feature was released in Nvim 0.3.0.

So far the feedback has been positive. See :help api-buffer-updates for what is hopefully a brief but sufficient introduction. Drop by https://gitter.im/neovim/neovim if you have any questions.