I wouldn't call it "bad". Is it different from most modern programs? Certainly. But it does a lot of clever things well. A program that I use every day can't be all bad.
Bad as in hard to read, update, and maintain. It certainly achieves useful results! Congratulations on managing such a large change.
BTW, I just double-checked, and I can indeed make it flicker when resizing the window as you mention in emacs-devel. I guess I've just never noticed since I never resize anything (maximized windows or nothing).
> 400 lines of code to wait for keyboard input.. sweet Jesus.
That function isn't particularly bad. It's a little messy, but it's reasonable for legacy portable code.
>> This function is over 400 lines and contains over 40 #ifdefs.
This is a low-level function that is supposed to handle different platforms, so this is the function where platform-specific #ifdefs should be collected. It's mostly a giant case/switch style #ifdef wrapper around a list of platforms and features.
>> Vim tries to be compatible with every OS, including dead ones such as BeOS, VMS, and Amiga.
That isn't a bad thing. Unless there is an actual[1] problem with the legacy platform support, then it should be left in for the people that do use the "dead" OS.
> Features that drastically change behavior are enabled/disabled with preprocessor flags.
Yes, that's the point of those flags. This is to enable/disable major features like XCLIPBOARD support which isn't going to compile on non-X11 platforms, or for debug and other unusual features that shouldn't be included in standard builds.
> Cross-platform libraries like libuv didn’t exist when Vim was created.
Sure. Which is why this function exists. Also, libuv is nice, but it isn't a replacement for all of the features (like XCLIPBOARD) this function provides. Even if most of the function was replaced with a libuv port, some of the #ifdefs would still be necessary.
