M4 as a templating language (2020)

Re:M4 as a templating language (2020) by zbentley on Thursday July 29, 2021 @11:24PM (#28004102)

And m4 works in combination with a bunch of C code. Virtually any system with m4 can come with an interpreter for a higher level language without running out of space (I can't imagine many uses for m4 at runtime on systems where, say, a perl interpreter wouldn't fit). Why is relying on such a runtime a problem?

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Re:M4 as a templating language (2020) by bonzini on Friday July 30, 2021 @05:06AM (#28005983)

No, m4 is written in C but it is autonomous. Liquid needs something like Jekyll around it.

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Re:M4 as a templating language (2020) by ricardobeat on Friday July 30, 2021 @07:07AM (#28006690)

What does “autonomous” mean? There are a ton of template engines that don’t depend on a parent framework, there is no reason you can’t implement all features in C.

Something like mustache for example, which has a C implementation that includes support for includes/partials: http://mustache.github.io/mustache.5.html

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Re:M4 as a templating language (2020) by bonzini on Friday July 30, 2021 @12:09PM (#28009478)

Jinja2 is an API and it needs a Python program to determine the values for the substitution variable and invoke the template engine. In contrast the M4 executable is the engine.

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