Internationalization support and format strings

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

The GNU gettext package contains tools for internationalization, 
enabling a programmer to make their package "speak" to the users 
in their specific language.

GNU gettext so far supports a number of programming languages, see
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/List-of-Programming-Languages.html

I thought it would be a good idea to make GNU gettext support 
also the D programming language. This is a registered wish list 
item since 2017: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?51291 . On the D 
side, a rudimentary interface to the gettext() function in the 
GNU C library exists as well: 
https://code.dlang.org/packages/libintl

I am now trying to implement this support. I am already done with 
the xgettext support (parsing D source code and extracting 
messages). But from the programming language, this support also 
needs format strings with positions (so that translators can 
reorder arguments in their translations of format strings).

D has format strings in its standard library (phobos): 
https://dlang.org/library/std/format.html
But this format string facility has 4 major bugs:
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10699
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10711
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10712
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10713

Two questions:

1) How can this be, that a programming language that is more than 
20 years old and that is integrated into GCC for 6 years, has a 
format string facility that is riddled with bugs? Is D only a 
playground for compiler hackers and not used for real 
applications, and thus the standard library is "uninteresting"?

2) How should I continue? What advice would you give me? Should I 
wait until the format string bugs are fixed (and if so, in which 
time frame)? Or should I cancel the GNU gettext support for D ?

Best regards. I don't want to offend anyone. If you feel an 
offense, please excuse it with frustration on my side.