Nvim 0.9 removes ui_bridge

[justinmk]

hi @qvacua ! Just a heads up, in neovim/neovim#18375 and related PRs, Nvim removed ui_bridge. What this means for projects like vimr is that, when embedding Nvim in-process, the UI protocol is done over msgpack instead of C pointers.

[imajes]

that sounds like a fair amount of work :/

[justinmk]

Maybe. But maybe not--most UIs work over RPC. Some ideas:

• There is a old (not fully implemented) idea for nvim to be able to work as a msgpack-rpc client, so applications like vimr could link to libnvim and use it to communicate with a remote nvim. So then vimr could continue to work with C buffers but wouldn't have to deal with rpc.
• msgpack library for swift... https://github.com/gabriel/MPMessagePack

[archoversight]

The existing UIBridge already uses a client (VimR) and server model (NvimServer), the updates would be to have it uses msgpack instead of the msgpack over MachPorts.

See https://github.com/qvacua/vimr/blob/master/NvimView/Sources/NvimView/UiBridge.swift

Currently the NvimServer is a patched version of neovim which is why updates have been slow because of the additional patching work that has to be done: neovim/neovim@master...qvacua:neovim:develop

[qvacua]

Thanks to @georgeharker 's contribution, VimR now uses stock Neovim binary.