I comment text in both English and German. The (now semi-defunct) feddit.de instance has some/many/most communities that only allow German as language, while on other instances or in communities only English is allowed (or at least that’s the only way my comments get posted).
This creates the problem that I cannot really set a default language tag, because that would regularly delete my comments when the comment doesn’t get posted with no or the wrong language tag (because I forgot to add or change the tag.
I don’t know about programming, but I’m not sure how taxing this would be memory- or caching-wise.
Wow that went fast, thank you!
Interesting that the localisation of the languages are visible in the files. Some time ago I translated text for a game (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead) and they had their text mostly in (IIRC binary) .po files. I’m not sure why they did that though.
The PO format is the de-facto standard for software localization in open-source projects, it is a textual format (.po files are converted to binary .mo during the build process and linked against the executable) and it was originally designed for the GNU gettext internationalization library for the C language, but it has been ported to Python and other languages too over time as it grew popular. More info here.
Mobile apps have always been widely incompatible with it, Android apps use XML resources, iOS apps use Localizable.strings (aka stringtables, similar to .properties files), Flutter apps use the .ARB format which is JSON-based.
Thanks for the write-up.