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83 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
# Porting to new Operating System Environments
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This document outlines the steps required to port Ladybird to a new OS environment, and expectations for such ports to
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be accepted into the mainline repository.
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## Types of Ports
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There are two types of ports that can be made to Ladybird:
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- Chrome port: We define the "browser chrome" as the UI layer. This includes the browser window, tabs, address bar, etc.
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- Platform port: This includes the underlying platform-specific code that interacts with the OS. This includes things like
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file I/O, networking, and process management.
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### Chrome Ports
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There are currently three supported chrome ports:
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- Qt6: The generic chrome port.
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- AppKit/Cocoa: The macOS native port, which uses the AppKit framework.
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- Headless: A headless port that does not have a UI, used for testing.
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### Platform Ports
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There are currently two supported platform ports:
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- GNU/Linux: The Linux platform port that may work on other POSIX platforms
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- macOS: The macOS platform port
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Many other POSIX desktop platforms are known to work, or have worked in the past, but are not officially supported.
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These include Alpine Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Haiku. Support for these Unixen is community-supported, meaning there
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is no regular CI guaranteeing that each master commit keeps them working. Patches to bring them back in line
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are welcome!
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There is currently one in progress platform port:
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- Android: The Android platform port, using the Android SDK/NDK directly.
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## Porting Steps
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### Chrome ports
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Chrome ports mostly concern themselves with the UI layer. This means the main Ladybird process, using LibWebView.
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To create a new Ladybird chrome, you will need to implement a new `WebView::ViewImplementation` subclass.
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ViewImplementation is the main interface between the UI process and WebContent processes. It is expected that each tab
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of the browser will have its own WebContent process. This is all managed by the WebView layer.
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Each chrome must also subclass `WebView::Application` to add any chrome-specific command-line flags.
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TODO: Explain any more details that are necessary
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### Platform ports
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Platform ports concern themselves with the underlying OS-specific code. In Ladybird, this code is largely contained in
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the AK and LibCore libraries.
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AK is the standard template library for Ladybird. The first step of a new platform port is a new platform define in
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`AK/Platform.h`. This define will be used to conditionally compile platform-specific code.
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In AK, the most likely class to need platform-specific code is `AK::StackInfo`.
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LibCore is an abstraction over POSIX. It contains classes to wrap lower level OS functionality into APIs that are
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comfortable for Ladybird developers to use. The most likely place to need adjustment is `Core::System`, followed by
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`Core::Process` and `Core::Socket`.
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Ladybird makes heavy use of IPC, and the IPC layer is in `LibIPC`. This layer is mostly platform-agnostic, but there are
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some platform-specific details in LibCore that may need to be adjusted. The IPC system is based on Unix domain sockets,
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so any platform that supports Unix domain sockets should be able to use the IPC system out of the box.
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## Special Consideration
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### Windows
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Over the years excitement about a native windows port has waxed and waned. The main issue is that Ladybird is built on
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top of LibCore, which is a POSIX abstraction. Windows is not POSIX, and so a Windows port requires a significant amount
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of effort to implement.
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To limit the scope of the work, we have decided that a Windows port will need the following properties:
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- Target x86_64-windows-msvc and arm64-windows-msvc only. We are not interested in accepting patches to make MinGW or MSYS2 work.
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- The port must use `clang-cl.exe` as the compiler. We are not interested in accepting patches to make MSVC work.
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- Platform `#ifdef`s must stay within AK and LibCore, with a few exceptions in LibWebView.
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- Prefer separate cpp files with the same interface to `#ifdef`s within a single file.
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- Avoid `#ifdef`s in headers, as much as possible.
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