nimscripter VS coc-ccls

> What does this mean? There's a runtime VM or compile time VM?

Compile time VM. It's used to run macros / templates / concepts. You can also run most code at compile time in a `static` block except for stuff that needs C calls. You can also compile the VM into a program and use it as a runtime VM (see https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter) which I do in my GUI lib. NIR should enable the compile time VM to run faster too, and possibly use JIT'ed code.

Checkout Nim! It does much of what you describe and its great. The core language is fairly small (not quite lua simple but probably ML comparable). It compiles fast enough that a Nim repl like `inim` is useable to check features and for basic maths, though it requires a C compiler, but TCC [4] works perfectly. Essentially Nim + tcc is pretty close to your description, IMHO. Though I'm not sure TCC supports non-x86 targets.

I've never used it but Nim does support some hot reloading as well [3]. It also has a real VM if you want to run user scripts and has a nice library for it [1]. Its not quite Lua flexible but for a generally compiled language its impressive.

Recently I made a wrapper to embed access to the Nim compilers macros at runtime [2]. It took 3-4 hours probably and still compiles in 10s of seconds despite building in a fair bit of the compiler! It was useful for making a code generator for a serializer format. Though I'm not sure its small enough to live on even beefy m4/m7 microcontrollers. Though I'm tempted to try.

1: https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter

I just did a fresh reinstall of CoC, on a newer version of Neovim. I'm now seeing something I hadn't seen before, which CoC calls "inlay hints". They look like this:

As recommended by michaelsbradley below, I installed https://github.com/nim-lang/langserver. I'm using coc.nvim (https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim) so I followed the instructions here from nim langserver https://github.com/nim-lang/langserver#vimneovim and seems to be working well!

Actually, I'm maintaining coc-perl (https://github.com/bmeneg/coc-perl), which enables the use of Perl LSP extension for vcode on vim/neovim using the CoC (https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim) backend. But it's completely on top of Perl::LanguageServer.

For vim specifically, I've been using coc.nvim, which works pretty well for my needs, and I know its quite popular. Another fairly popular one is YouCompleteMe, which I had taken a look at for some other languages; but ended up just using coc as I can't justify using YCM once a year (if that) -- too much "headache" for not a lot of use, you know?

Plug 'https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim' " Auto Completion

I do think VSCode is a great tool and I recommend it frequently to people, but I still want to set the record straight here. Yes, vim is obviously limited in the sense that as a CLI app it doesn't draw it's own PDF or HTML windows, that's fair. But it can remote control your favorite PDF viewer or browser for roughly the same functionality. I'm currently writing my thesis using vimtex and it's quite smooth. And all the other stuff you mention is implemented quite competently by various plugins like vim-fugitive, coc.nvim, vimspector and copilot.vim.

Sounds like you want vim-which-key and coc.nvim.

Another option is to just download https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim Which is basically a one stop shop for completion, and it's pretty fast, it just uses nodejs instead of built in nvim lua functions.

coc.nvim

dont over copy and paste example .vimrc, keep it simple and grow tooling as you use. for linting and code completion : https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim (easy to add languages)