Unicode emojis shown as tofu

[pidgin at alexoren.com]

I mentioned the issue on the purple-discord github, and was told that the reason was that Pidgin on Windows uses an old version of GTK that doesn't support emoji.

The suggestion was to manually upgrade the version of GTK but after spending hours trying to make it work, I gave up.

I started from the GTK download page, which says:
"Note: These instructions are intended for developers wanting to create Windows applications based on GTK, not for end-users. On Windows, GTK applications are typically bundled with GTK already, so end-users do not need to worry about how to install GTK itself."

Nevertheless, I tried following the directions and ended up with the whole MINGW -- all 1.3GB of binaries.  Replaced like-named DLLs in the GTP directory, chased DLL dependencies to find which additional ones need to be copied, replaced DLLs in the main Pidgin directory...  After many hours I got to the point that Pidgin loaded but all the plug-ins failed to load.  At that point I gave up and reverted.

Can anyone help?

If it's just a question of building Pidgin with a newer version, why won't the development team (for the lack of a better term) do it?

Thank you.