Hello lists, I rewrote GNU m4 in Python. Long story short, I wanted to learn m4 to fix some issues I had with GNU Guile and Autotools, and after realizing m4 1.4 is ~8000 lines of code and reading e.g. <https://www.owlfolio.org/development/autoconf-swot/> which claims "Feature gaps in GNU M4 hold back development of Autoconf." I thought I'd rewrite it in Rust. (It turned out to be more beneficial to rewrite in Python due to faster prototyping for the time being.) Eventually I plan to get back to my original purpose of fixing the integration of GNU Guile and Autotools.
You can find the project home page here, <https://codeberg.org/annoyingusername/m4p> and you can install with pip via `pip install m4p`. I'm hoping that this is a welcome addition. I'm interested to hear if m4p works as a GNU m4 replacement for you, and any issues that arise. I have not yet implemented: 1. traceon, traceoff, changeword, debugmode, debugfile, dumpdef 2. Some of the command-line options. I'm worried about: 1. What mode GNU m4 opens files in; m4p always open in binary, potentially treating carriage return differently on Windows. 2. Sneaky bugs. The functions that I have not yet implemented are debug functions, so they probably will not affect production m4 macros. The changeword macro might be removed in future versions of GNU m4 and I might not implement it at all, not sure if anyone uses it. I have not had any benchmarks, but from roughly looking at how long tests take I'm measuring a 100x slowdown. I'm hoping to rewrite it in Rust later to address that. Regards, Nikolaos Chatzikonstantinou
