How to write a less-to-less transformer?

[rulatir]

I need to write a less-to-less transformer to recursively inline all locally resolvable @imports. Can this be done as a plugin, or must I fork less.js?

I am trying to implement fast in-browser preview powered by modifyVars() without refactoring a huge LESS codebase that was originally developed for command line compilation and uses custom file managers that can't be easily implemented in browser.

[seven-phases-max]

It's possible with a plugin but that would be very suboptimal and dramatically tedious. The problem is that you'll have to render the internal AST format back to Less code and there's nothing in the compiler code-base to help you with that (the compiler is built around AST->CSS conversion only).
It would be much easier if you simply parse your input files for imports with some regexs and perform basic string-based substitutions.

[seven-phases-max]

Closing in favour of #2428 (see my comment there too).