We as developers and open source advocates have to get over this "thou shall not ever remove code" no matter how old and useless it may be. What the NeoVim tea

We as developers and open source advocates have to get over this "thou shall not ever remove code" no matter how old and useless it may be. What the NeoVim team is doing sounds a whole lot like what the libressl team did when they forked OpenSSL, which also had tons of code for obsolete operating systems. At the point of this presentation[1], they removed 90,000 lines of code; it's probably more now. Unlike system software like OpenSSL, Vim is something I (and many developers) spend many hours each day using. In 2014, there's no good reason why it shouldn't be as responsive and flexible as possible. Sometimes when my projects get large and have lots of files open and Vim starts to slowdown just a little, you can almost feel the decades of technical debt taking its toll. As someone mentioned previously, the function that waits for user input [2] is 400 lines long and has more the 41 ifdefs, many for operating systems that have been long dead. Interestingly enough, it's because of the growing popularity of Vim that this is becoming more of an issue. I live in the Boston area and have visited many startups; Vim is quite popular among them. Yes, it's a little hipster, but in a good way. ;-) We have lots of seasoned developers at our Vim meetup [3] of course, but there are way more younger people who've discovered Vim. The room is usually packed. 1. http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00026.html http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00026.htm... 2. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/os_unix.c#L5222 https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/os_unix... 3. http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Vim-Meetup/ http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Vim-Meetup/