The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation.

The original gnulib-tool program is a shell script implementation for importing of Gnulib modules into programs for enhancing code portability. Several GNU developers have been rewriting gnulib-tool in Python rather than the shell scripts in order to address criticism of the slow performance.

Bruno Haible announced today that the Python-ized gnulib-tool implementation is ready for beta testing and should be much faster:

"gnulib-tool has been known for being slow for many years. We have listened to your complaints. A rewrite of gnulib-tool in another programming language (Python) is ready for beta-testing. It is between 8 times and 100 times faster than the original gnulib-tool.

Both implementations should behave identically, that is, produce the same generated files and the same output."

In [1]the mailing list announcement calling for beta testing the new Gnulib code, it outlines the steps to compare the shell and Python versions of gnulib-tool for those interested.



[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2024-04/msg00001.html