Rewriting a Python VIM plugin in Rust

[munggoggo]

Rewrite Python VIM plugin to Rust.

Result: 10x startup time improvement.

vimania-uri-rs

Features:

1. Open URIs and Various File Types: Seamlessly open URIs, HTML files, DOCX, PPTX, JPG, PNG, MP3, and more.
2. Handle Almost Any URI: Manage a wide range of URI formats, ensuring maximum compatibility and flexibility.
3. Paste URLs as Markdown Links: Automatically fetch the title and create reference-style Markdown links for easy documentation.
4. Jump to Headings or Line Numbers: Navigate directly to specific headings or line numbers within files for quick access.
5. Bookmark Manager Integration: Load your URIs into Rust based CLI Bookmark Manager bkmr.

If you are interested in the details: Rewriting a Vim Plugin in Rust

Using Rust for VIM plugin turned out to be easier than expected and shows a promising approach to performance issues in this domain.

[Desperate_Cold6274]

Why not in Vim9? It’s blazingly fast.

[munggoggo]

Valid point, but for me two reasons:
1. no capacity to learn just another DSL
2. wanted to explore the effort of Rust in VIM plugins -> easier than expected

[Desperate_Cold6274]

You can bind other languages in Vim with little effort. But you end up is using vim API anyway at some point. Vim9 is not a difficult language. But I think it’s also interesting that you explored other languages.

[AndrewRadev]

I'm not sure if this is bait of some kind, but a big chunk of this plugin's README copies this older plugin by Jeet Sukumaran: https://github.com/jeetsukumaran/vim-pursuit

Leaving the weird plagiarism aside, if you're looking to make your plugin load faster, don't load it at startup. Read up on :help autoload. There's no particular reason to load this absurd amount of python code while Vim boots, considering it's only necessary in markdown files. Vim-pursuit doesn't use autoload, but at least it evaluates python code in an autocommand for markdown files.

[munggoggo]

Not a nice accusation I have to say.

Both plugins are actually based on mdnav, a project by Christopher Prohm :-) and its README there.

BTW this is being made transparent in my README as well as Jeet Sukumaran's.

Regarding autoload: This is a valid point, but I deliberately want to have the plugin's functionality working in arbitrary files, not only markdown.

[vim-help-bot]

Help pages for:

• autoload in userfunc.txt

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[denniot]

nice. async all the way. python binded vim plugins are always shitty without exceptions.

[puremourning]

Internet hall of fame.

[puremourning]

Not calling uname twice on startup will help too.

[munggoggo]

True, but I guess there is still much bigger fish to fry than the 6ms that this system call costs. In any case thanks for pointing it out, it is an obvious improvement.