After years of development, there are new major releases of both Emacs and Vim: “Vim 8.0 released!”, “Emacs 25.1 released”. Emacs is somewhat unusual in versioning, so don’t get confused: 25.1 is the first stable release, while 25.0 was for unstable ones.
Highlights of the highlights listed in the release notes: Emacs now has C FFI and Xwidgets support, while Vim got asynchronous I/O and closures.
Both emacs and vi were initially released in 1976, and both are trying to provide efficient controls and extensibility. Both seem to be extremely slow in adopting new features1 in their extension languages, and neither can just switch to a sane language, since that would break tons of code and configuration files written in the past decades. As even the last changes suggest, Emacs is not called an “operating system” for nothing, while Vim still tries to be just a text editor.
Things go as usual, and perhaps the biggest surprise here is that Vim finally got ahead of Emacs in something: in stable major release date, by a few days.
Well, FFIs, asynchronous I/O, and closures were there even before 1976, so it can be generalized to any features.↩