Why all the workarounds.

[mmlb]

So I have been following YouCompleteMe for a little while now, and the issue of vim is dumb because it does x (no background processing, blocks gui, pretends to block scolling...) and the hacks / work arounds to get around them keeps coming up.

While reading @Valloric's comment on #234 (comment) mentions the abusing of Vim's conceal feature. My question is why continue the hacking/abusing and not fixing things in upstream.

Note: I am not trying to troll or bring flames, I just wanted to have a bit of a conversation here, where I see lots of progress, and really cool features while having to deal with Vim's failings.

Is the lack of upstream changes due to upstream? Do they want to avoid feature creep? Is the barrier to entry ridiculous?

Apologies for the off-topicness.

[Valloric]

Because the Vim codebase is an unmaintainable pile of garbage, that's why. For instance, look at the "edit" function in Vim's code base.

I don't ever want to look at Vim internals again, let alone touch them. If you wish to do the work yourself, you have my complete support.

[mmlb]

Wow, kind of what I thought.

[Shougo]

So I have been following YouCompleteMe for a little while now, and the issue of vim is dumb because it does x (no background processing, blocks gui, pretends to block scolling...) and the hacks / work arounds to get around them keeps coming up.

Vim cannot be multithread. Because in Vim's internal code, there are many global variables with no lock.
And Mr.Moolenaar thinks Vim is editor not IDE. So IDE like feature is not merged to upstream code.
(But I think Vim is environment personally)

[vheon]

Am I wrong or they use pre-standard function definition? What a mess :(

[oblitum]

@vheon that's not a valid judgment point, it's documented why it's this way, it's because of compatibility with some weird compiler I can't recall. Long functions, on the other way... are bad.

[vheon]

@oblitum my "What a mess" was not for the non standard definition but for the rest. I understand that compatibility is very important for vim and that not everybody needs every feature, but how do you maintain that file so long and with all that conditional compilation?