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Porting to new Operating System Environments

This document outlines the steps required to port Ladybird to a new OS environment, and expectations for such ports to be accepted into the mainline repository.

Types of Ports

There are two types of ports that can be made to Ladybird:

  • Chrome port: We define the "browser chrome" as the UI layer. This includes the browser window, tabs, address bar, etc.
  • Platform port: This includes the underlying platform-specific code that interacts with the OS. This includes things like file I/O, networking, and process management.

Chrome Ports

There are currently three supported chrome ports:

  • Qt6: The generic chrome port.
  • AppKit/Cocoa: The macOS native port, which uses the AppKit framework.
  • Headless: A headless port that does not have a UI, used for testing.

Platform Ports

There are currently two supported platform ports:

  • GNU/Linux: The Linux platform port that may work on other POSIX platforms
  • macOS: The macOS platform port

Many other POSIX desktop platforms are known to work, or have worked in the past, but are not officially supported. Among others, these include Alpine Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Haiku. Support for these systems is community-driven, meaning there is no regular CI to ensure that each master branch commit maintains their functionality. Contributions to restore or improve compatibility are welcome!

There is currently one in progress platform port:

  • Android: The Android platform port, using the Android SDK/NDK directly. The removal of LibArchive and the DeprecatedPainter from the repository has left gaps, as the port previously depended on these components.

Porting Steps

Chrome ports

Chrome ports mostly concern themselves with the UI layer. This means the main Ladybird process, using LibWebView.

To create a new Ladybird chrome, you will need to implement a new WebView::ViewImplementation subclass. ViewImplementation is the main interface between the UI process and WebContent processes. It is expected that each tab of the browser will have its own WebContent process. This is all managed by the WebView layer.

Each chrome must also subclass WebView::Application to add any chrome-specific command-line flags.

TODO: Explain any more details that are necessary

Platform ports

Platform ports concern themselves with the underlying OS-specific code. In Ladybird, this code is largely contained in the AK and LibCore libraries.

AK is the standard template library for Ladybird. The first step of a new platform port is a new platform define in AK/Platform.h. This define will be used to conditionally compile platform-specific code. In AK, the most likely class to need platform-specific code is AK::StackInfo.

LibCore is an abstraction over POSIX. It contains classes to wrap lower level OS functionality into APIs that are comfortable for Ladybird developers to use. The most likely place to need adjustment is Core::System, followed by Core::Process and Core::Socket.

Ladybird makes heavy use of IPC, and the IPC layer is in LibIPC. This layer is mostly platform-agnostic, but there are some platform-specific details in LibCore that may need to be adjusted. The IPC system is based on Unix domain sockets, so any platform that supports Unix domain sockets should be able to use the IPC system out of the box.

Special Consideration

Windows

Over the years excitement about a native windows port has waxed and waned. The main issue is that Ladybird is built on top of LibCore, which is a POSIX abstraction. Windows is not POSIX, and so a Windows port requires a significant amount of effort to implement.

To limit the scope of the work, we have decided that a Windows port will need the following properties:

  • Target x86_64-windows-msvc and arm64-windows-msvc only. We are not interested in accepting patches to make MinGW or MSYS2 work.
  • The port must use clang-cl.exe as the compiler. We are not interested in accepting patches to make MSVC work.
  • Platform #ifdefs must stay within AK and LibCore, with a few exceptions in LibWebView.
  • Prefer separate cpp files with the same interface to #ifdefs within a single file.
  • Avoid #ifdefs in headers, as much as possible.