Announce: ECMAScript interface for Vim

Hi,
This is to announce the release of an ECMAScript scripting interface for Vim.

Why? Because it seemed like the right thing to do.

The longer backstory is that I recently returned to using Vim as a programming editor, when I was left without a computer and it was by far the best editor on the iPad. The last time I used Vim for programming, "fe" still stood for "fileencoding". I am aware that I missed around 20 years of Vim history and that Vim script is the way it is for good (historical) reasons. I soon discovered that Vim it had added control structures to ex scripts, then lists and dictionaries, then lambdas. It seemed on track to reinvent ECMAScript. Since at the time of writing, ECMAScript is by some measures the most popular programming language in the world, with an excellent free, embeddable and portable implementation (Duktape), it seems by far the best option to use the real thing for future Vim scripting.

Therefore, a Vim fork with a Duktape interface integrated can be found at:

https://github.com/bobpepin/vim/tree/duktape

Note that it is in the duktape branch of the repository.

Steps to compile:
1. Download a source release of Duktape from http://duktape.org and unpack
2. Clone the repository above, checkout the duktape branch
$ git clone -b duktape https://github.com/bobpepin/vim.git
3. Edit vim/src/Makefile, point CONF_OPT_DUKTAPE_PREFIX to the right directory in the duktape
sources
4. Compile Vim as usual

The API is probably best explained by example:
https://github.com/bobpepin/vim/blob/duktape/runtime/indent/python.js.

The python.js file was generated from indent/python.vim using a cross-compiler which can be found at https://github.com/bobpepin/vim2js.

To try it out, in a new buffer do :duk source('indent/python.js') and write some python code. It is also instructive to do vim -O python.vim python.js to get a side-by-side view of the two APIs.

There is also extensive documentation and further examples under :help duktape, or in runtime/doc/if_duk.txt (https://github.com/bobpepin/vim/blob/duktape/runtime/doc/if_duk.txt).

In the hope that somebody finds this useful,

Best,

Bob

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