impatient.nvim VS nvim-lua-guide

You could use impatient.nvim or the new vim.loader module if you’re on nightly. Both work really well. I used impatient for a long time and it reduced my startup time by half. I’m using vim.loader now and it reduces it by about the same amount

The 20-30 ms promise depends on your hardware. In my case, vanilla Neovim takes about 18 ms to startup, so a realistic good startup time for my config is around 50-60 ms. Lines of code isn’t a great reference either because you could just lazy load a bunch of plugins and have more LoC but still better startup times. What I would recommend is using lazy.nvim or if you wanna stick with packer, then pairing it with impatient.nvim .

automatically caches all startup code before :h VimEnter or :h BufReadPre (basically what impatient.nvim does)

there is an amazing plugin called impatient.nvim that cache a lot of stuff and make other pluggins go so fast !

Try installing https://github.com/lewis6991/impatient.nvim first.

:lua vim.pretty_print(vim.mpack.decode(vim.mpack.encode({some = { thing = false }}))) used by impatient.nvim

Did you defined your [[ and ]] mappings in that file or just created it? the after directory runs at the end of your config so you can override this kind of settings. Maybe you are using impatient.nvim? From their README:

Are you using impatient.nvim? It caches lua modules. My startuptime with 72 plugins (including it) and zero lazy loading is 600ms.

Nvim Lua guide

My main struggles beyond a simple problem are just the inability to find a way to easily debug things and the general process for setting up a plugin. I mostly work with Python/Jupyter, some C and Lua/Bash scripts, and usually you can either write tests/print debug for smaller scale things or get some stack trace if you have an error. With Neovim development, it just feels like there's nothing more besides update plugin, try on neovim, fail, bash head against wall, and repeat, and that doesn't quite seem efficient or correct - I'm sure there's something out there that should make the process easier. I tried looking online but I haven't found many that really fit my needs (most of the resources here seem more targeted towards creating your own init.lua, and Luadev plugin's commands are all broken (:Luadev-RunLine and any other command keeps telling me I got some trailing space). I'm really just looking to see how to make a snippet library, but there doesn't seem to be much that helps me. If someone could let me know how they debug their plugin or point me to any external resources, please let me know!

I have no guidance for the first point. For the second, checkout the neovim lua guide or : lua-guide

A quick google search turned up this codeacademy class on learning to program in Javascript. I didn't vet the whole thing, but it appears to assume you know nothing, which is what you need. If you go through that, you can then consume one of the resources that /u/luascriptdev post to equate that back to Lua. Again, the concepts translate.