Change return type of wxGetTranslation (PR #26196)

Maarten

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Feb 15, 2026, 4:20:23 PMFeb 15

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Change it from const wxString& to just wxString so there is no need to keep a copy around of untranslated strings.
This allows to remove thread_local UntranslatedStringHolder used by GetUntranslatedString, which causes many problems with MinGW.

Fixes #26195

You can view, comment on, or merge this pull request online at:

https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/pull/26196

Commit Summary

02cff90 Change return type of wxGetTranslation
6db1182 Fix building with wxUSE_INTL disabled

File Changes

(11 files)

Patch Links:

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VZ

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Feb 15, 2026, 8:45:32 PMFeb 15

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vadz left a comment (wxWidgets/wxWidgets#26196)

Looks good to me, thanks!

Pinging @vslavik just in case I'm forgetting any reason not to apply this.

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Václav Slavík

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Feb 16, 2026, 3:37:16 AMFeb 16

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vslavik left a comment (wxWidgets/wxWidgets#26196)

Pinging @vslavik just in case I'm forgetting any reason not to apply this.

I don't remember the reasons for this code (maybe git blame can provide hints, but probably not after all that time), but the only ones I can think of are performance (seems unlikely though) and API compatibility back when we unified ANSI and Unicode builds. Plausibly the function returned wxChar* back then and there was a risk of it being stored. If wxGetTranslation returned a copy and its wxChar* conversion was implicitly called, there would be use-after-free.

I don't think this is concern nowadays.

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VZ

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Feb 16, 2026, 11:16:25 AMFeb 16

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Merged #26196 into master.

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taler21

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Feb 17, 2026, 1:33:32 AMFeb 17

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taler21 left a comment (wxWidgets/wxWidgets#26196)

Such a change needs to be documented as a potential incompatibility in Changes in behaviour not resulting in compilation errors.

For example, in our project there is in some places code like this

const wxString& GetText() const { return wxGetTranslation( ms_texts[m_index] ); }

that needs to be adapted accordingly.

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Maarten

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Feb 17, 2026, 5:23:49 AMFeb 17

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MaartenBent left a comment (wxWidgets/wxWidgets#26196)

Good point. I mistakenly thought the changelog was only updated whenever a release is made, but incompatible changes should be added immediately.

Depending on settings, compilers do give a warning or error after this change, like:

error C2220: the following warning is treated as an error
warning C4172: returning address of local variable or temporary

But this is not the default, so putting it in Changes in behaviour not resulting in compilation errors seems correct to me.

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VZ

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Feb 18, 2026, 10:11:37 AMFeb 18

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vadz left a comment (wxWidgets/wxWidgets#26196)

I thought compilers would warn about this but if they don't, this change is worse than I thought :-( It's probably still not enough to revert it.