gettext has issues on windows, find an alternative. about openrhythm

[mdsitton]

Basically most of the issues is having msvc find libintl.h (which i cant even find in the source distribution for gettext even though there is a intl library code in it)

I've found some other libraries that try to replicate gettext functionality in a few different ways
https://github.com/cbeck88/spirit-po

• depends on boost so meh
• po only
• boost license.

https://github.com/tinygettext/tinygettext

• Only uses po files
• A fairly long running project (looks like it started in 2004)
• An older forked version of this is also used in SuperTuxKart
• Relatively small code base if we wanted to fork it internally.
  • the previous developer seems to have mostly abandoned it.
• zlib license

Out of all of these i'd be most likely to use tinygettext.

The most annoying thing so far about gettext, it seems like whenever anyone asks about localization anywhere on the internet every single response is to just use gettext. None explain the process of getting it to work well cross platform. Practically every search result is from people using it from other languages... not C or C++. This alone makes me want to ignore it and take in a local fork of tinygettext, and modify it for our needs(like what SuperTuxKart did). Plus it could simplify the build process, and the process for making new translations(maybe I need to look into how its actually used to make a better say on that)

There are some other games and projects that are using it as well, so i think its something to look into.

[Salamandar]

Well i agree on some things : Gettext is a pain in the ass to set up. I just experienced that.
That's weird to use directly po files, I'd like to see how TinyGettext benchmarks :p (a good point, it's a fairly active project)

[mdsitton]

Basically if we forked it it would just mainly be cleaning up some stuff, like using our logging, filesystem code. and maybe removing the dependency on inconv(we can just use UTF-8 encoded stuff and it should be fine)

Also here is where the dev said he doesnt really want to work on it anymore:
tinygettext/tinygettext#13

and the guy he gave commit access is a 0ad developer (which also uses tinygettext as far as i can tell)

[Salamandar]

Btw, libintl.h is in glibc.
A lot of people are using Gettext with M$VC : http://stackoverflow.com/a/23146946/3888191
You have the developer files here : http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libintl.htm with a .dll.a and the header… I think it's enough ?
To be sincere I wouldn't want to add another dep (at least on Linux) as using .mo files is really perfectly integrated in Linux. But adding something for Windows, I don't care so using TinyGettext on Windows is good for me :p

[mdsitton]

Just fyi at some point I plan on bringing in https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt (its used in spdlog for log output). Because streams are terrible for translation purposes.

[Salamandar]

Seems cool stuff

[mdsitton]

I'm going to go ahead and post this copied directly from the long comment i created in main.cpp

Here is a few random alternatives i've found:

https://github.com/kaishiqi/I18N-Gettext-Supported
Haven't dug into much, MIT licensed cross platform, uses mo files.

https://github.com/tinygettext/tinygettext
tbh the code is pretty bad, and if we were going to use this it would only be as a beginning.
Uses po files.

https://github.com/laurent22/simple-gettext
GPL Licensed, mo file parser.

https://github.com/clawoo/mofilereader
MIT License, mo file parser. Only supports UTF-8 (Totally fine with me)

https://github.com/vslavik/poedit
Useful translation editor.