1. Do these extensions support atomic transactions?

2. Are they capable of compressing the contents of an INI file at all, and/or placing the INI file into (or retrieving it from) a ZIP?

3. Do they operate asynchronously and/or on multiple processor threads?

4. Do they work with writing UTF-8 files (without BOM), and reading INI files encoded in UTF-16 (or in UTF-8 that mistakenly contains a BOM)?

5. Can the extension choose the filename when writing an INI file?

6. Can the extension automatically obfuscate a string that it's writing?

1. There is no need or capacity for atomic transactions in GML since there is no multi-threading.

2. You can use file_ini_print and then buffer_compress. See this extension for creating actual ZIP files.

3. This extension is pure-GML on native platforms and has a JS-based version for HTML5. As you might guess, it would not cost $4 if I had to recompile native binaries for a dozen platforms and even more architectures every time I made an addition/change/fix.

4. This extension supports files in UTF-8, optionally with BOM. GameMaker lacks native support for UTF-16, so supporting that would take toll on speed of the extension.

5. You have full control over that, including opening an INI from one path but saving it to another - see documentation.

6. INI files by definition are intended to be human-readable configuration files, therefore it makes no sense to add such features. Regardless, you are free to use file_ini_parse and file_ini_print if you want a pre/post processing step to encrypt/decrypt the contents.