An up-to-date backport of translate-c for 0.16.0

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Hey folks,

I’ve noticed a few people posting here about having issues with translate-c since 0.16.0.

I’ve been actively helping out with resolving some of the outstanding issues with Aro and translate-c as we work to update Ghostty to 0.16.0. I’m currently maintaining a branch with mostly up-to-date versions of both that you can try out here. This is the version that powers the in-flight update PR (almost done!).

Feel free to check it out, with the caveat that it might change at any time (fetch against a commit, and/or fork/vendor if you do use it), and that it will eventually go away (probably when 0.17.0 rolls around and we don’t need it any more).

Hopefully this is helpful to some of y’all having issues!

(PS: Let me know if there’s a future update that’s missing and I’ll see about pulling it in - fixes will probably slow now that it’s working for Ghostty.)

(PPS: There’s a lot more work there than mine, obviously, and I’m super grateful to the Aro and translate-c folks, particularly Veikka (vexu) and Evan (ehaas), for their support during the process!)

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C import overflows
Translate-C error on 0.17.0-dev.607+456b2ec07 when importing GTK4 libraries
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Hi vancluever :waving_hand:,

Thanks so much for putting together this backport!

I recently hit an issue in the official 0.16.0 branch of translate-c where linking system libraries failed during cross-compilation (https://codeberg.org/ziglang/translate-c/issues/409). Void Linux’s CI actually caught this and some other bugs (some of them because [I think] I used the wrong API).

To fix it, I went through a bit of a journey:

  1. I first tried switching back to the deprecated b.addTranslateC API as a temporary workaround.
  2. After testing, that approach still caused issues, so I decided to fork translate-c to manually cherry-pick the proper fixes and newer APIs from the master branch. However, managing those manual cherry-picks quickly turned into a very tedious and complex process.
  3. Luckily, that exact same day, I stumbled across your post on Zulip!

Your fork already had the backported APIs ready to go, along with a whole lot more. I immediately dropped my messy workarounds, switched over to your branch, and it has been working flawlessly.

Just wanted to let you know that your work is directly helping other people and projects too (in addition to Ghostty ofc). I really appreciate the effort you put into maintaining this!

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Thank you very much for the kind words and glad it’s working out for you @BratishkaErik!

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PS: I just pushed an update to the branch with the fix mentioned in the GTK thread.