alt Hacker NewsI think that ideally, every project would be setup from scratch in the beginning to use t() tags or something similar to have translation keys so that setting up translations is as easy as swapping out what t() returns (from e.g. a config file or the like).
Of course, we all know that this is very rarely how projects end up getting setup especially in the early stages, and then it's just massive amounts of work to go back and set it up later.
The thing that's the most intriguing to me about what you're describing is automatically setting up translations in the build step where you auto-detect strings to translate. But looking at the site, most of it seems to be focused around the VSCode extension which will just sort of find and replace strings in the source code with t() tags.
Can you talk more about the translations in the build step? Is there a reason you're not talking more about that on the site? (Is it just newer, not very reliable/good, or...)?
The idea that I could just throw something like this into my project, not have t() tags in my source code but still get translations, sounds like magic and I think it would be really neat.
Yeah, we've noticed that companies in the early stage ignore i10n completely and then eventually realize it's going to be a huge lift to retroactively support it
So, for the build time translation-
Yeah, I would say it's not reliable yet =p
But, it's not that far off. It's not magic- the idea is that we inject the t functions at build time so that they don't need to be in your code. The vscode extension is a good visual for this- for many patterns, it correctly notices what does or doesn't need to be translated.
But, the real problem is that if a process like this goes awry (a strange pattern leads to text being erroneously translated/untranslated) then it is next to impossible for someone to debug.
Glad you think this is cool. We think this is absolutely on the horizon, and we hope to be the first to get people using it... but in the meantime, we don't want to be responsible for issues on prod...