Supported platforms#

At the moment, only Linux is supported for building and running vs as its primary target.
It is likely that all major CPU architectures are supported, and several POSIX systems can also be targetted.

This is just temporary limitation, as all dependencies being used by this project are highly portable, but my own code and the build system are probably not.

Platform	Arch	Building	Running
debian-trixie	amd64	✅	✅
debian-trixie	arm64	❓	❓
debian-trixie	risc64	❓	❓
freedektop-24.08	amd64	✅*	✅*
macos-13	amd64	❓	❓
macos-14	arm64	✅	❓
win64	amd64	❌	❓

In addition to this, the building environment is also distributed via docker images.

Distribution#

There are plans to distribute both stable and nightly releases of vs. Please, be mindful that nightly releases can be extremely broken, and for safety reasons they will only be offered as flatpaks.

Distribution formats which are expected to be supported at some point:

• flatpak targetting the latest stable freedesktop environment
• deb for the latest stable and experimental of debian (multiarch)
• aur for arch linux and derivatives
• brew for macos

Installing directly via meson is very much not suggested if you don’t want to break your system.

Building requirements#

You will need a proper Linux environment, with a modern C++ toolchain installed.
Specifically, I suggest clang-19 or higher, as this repo is using modern C23 features like #embed to make everyone’s (my) life a bit easier. In addition to that, this repo makes use of:

• meson as its main build system. Any recent-ish version will do (unless you need zig to simplify cross-compiling; for that >= 1.60 is needed)
• bun as the ts/js runtime to support all the code generation tasks and some of the more complex pipelines.
  I hate bash, and this is what replaces it.
• swiftc barely used for now, but many of the native components shipped within vs will be written in swift (or so I am planning). Version 6 or higher is needed.

FLTK#

If your system provides a modern version of fltk>=1.4, that will be used by default. If not present, you are likely needing few more dependencies depending on your distribution. On debian-like systems the followings are needed:

• libpng-dev
• libglu1-mesa-dev
• libpango1.0-dev

There are also some more or less optional dependencies:

• libcurl-dev, unless you are trying to compile a custom version without network support, or http only which are supported.
• gnuplot if you want to generate plots from testing & benchmarking reports.
• flatpak-builder if you plan on packing and distributing a flatpak of vs (usually not needed, read more about it later in this document)

Additional documentation#

To generate the additional documentation for distribution and consumption:

• mkdocs and several packages for themes and extensions.
• mkdocs
• mkdocs-github-admonitions-plugin
• more to be documented
• doxygen for documentation generated from the code itself.

IDE integrations#

There is an ongoing effort to better support vs with a proper lsp.
In the same repo there is also a vscode client extension.

vs is expected to leverage this LSP directly in its embedded editor once integrated.

Docker#

A docker image is available that automatically covers all the build dependencies. See docker/README.md for further documentation.

Building process#

Start by installing all the bun dependencies needed:

bun install

Then run the following NPM scripts:

bun run codegen                     #Initial codegen from schemas
bun run meson-setup.release         #Set up the meson build directory.
bun run meson-build                 #Build everything!

You might want to use meson-setup.clang-release to use clang-19 if found on your system, and your default compiler or choice might not support some modern functions used in this project.

To perform tests and benchmarks:

bun run test
bun run benchmark

To run the dev demo where features under development are usually being tested:

bun run vs.example

Installation#

bun run meson-install is now implemented & tested. By default, it installs everything in ./build/dist.

Flatpak#

Flatpak is not really the ideal approach to deliver vs due to the intrinsic cost of having a separate runtime already installed on each system.
Also, its sandboxing & permission system might raise some issues (but also help to mitigate the current lack of safety features).
Still, it is good to support it at these early stages, since many libraries & build dependencies are bleeding-edge, and other forms of distribution are not as convenient.

flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

if you never configured --user on your system.
Then

bun run codegen           #If not run already
bun run flatpak-builder