Speed?

[TornaxO7]

Would you say that packer.nvim has a faster loading time than the plugin managers like vim-plug? Because currently my plugins are influencing the loading time quite a bit (in comparison to vanilla nvim). It would be cool if packer.nvim could load the plugins asynchronysly or something like that.

[wbthomason]

"Faster" is hard to say with certainty. Fundamentally, packer, plug, and most every other plugin manager are doing the same thing - deferring sourcing plugins until certain events (i.e. lazy-loading). I like to think that packer makes it easier to do some more advanced forms of lazy-loading than plug, which could lead to improved load times, but this may vary by your use case. It is also worth noting that more lazy-loading is not always better - well-written plugins (which i.e. don't contain heavy logic in plugin/ or after/plugin/ that gets run on sourcing) often do not benefit significantly from being lazy-loaded, in which case you pay the (small) cost of the lazy-load logic for no benefit.

packer's main novelty is the use of a pre-compiled file containing the logic for lazy-loading plugins, so that this doesn't need to be generated at startup. This saves a small amount of time. That said, plug (and dein) have the benefit of a longer existence and therefore much more development time/contributions from many more people.

Asynchronous loading would indeed be really cool, and something I'd love to add to packer. The challenge is that (1) loading concurrently is challenging because many plugins modify global state, and (2) loading asynchronously (but on a single thread) raises the question of how to ensure that plugins are sourced before they're needed.