Re: m4p: an implementation of GNU m4 in Python

On Fri, 2025-05-09 at 17:45 -0400, Nikolaos Chatzikonstantinou wrote:
> 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.

FWIW, OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project knows how to cross compile a large
chunk of open source software and build functional images from source.
It runs autoreconf on most of the software so if you wanted to test
this against a large pool of software, it would allow that.

I'd be curious on the speed comparison if you do as autoreconf spends
most of it's time in m4.

Cheers,

Richard