Build from sources

Prerequisites

Lightpanda is written with Zig  0.14.0. You will have to install it with the right version in order to build the project. Lightpanda also depends on zig-js-runtime  (with v8), Netsurf libs  and Mimalloc .

To be able to build the v8 engine for zig-js-runtime, you have to install some libs:

For Debian/Ubuntu based Linux:

sudo apt install xz-utils \
    python3 ca-certificates git \
    pkg-config libglib2.0-dev \
    gperf libexpat1-dev unzip rsync \
    cmake clang

For MacOS, you need Xcode  and the following pacakges from homebrew:

brew install cmake pkgconf

Install and build dependencies

All in one build

You can run make install to install deps all in one (or make install-dev if you need the development versions).

Be aware that the build task is very long and cpu consuming, as you will build from sources all dependencies, including the v8 Javascript engine.

Step by step build dependency

The project uses git submodules for dependencies.

To init or update the submodules in the vendor/ directory:

make install-submodule

Netsurf libs

Netsurf libs are used for HTML parsing and DOM tree generation.

make install-netsurf

For dev env, use make install-netsurf-dev.

Mimalloc

Mimalloc is used as a C memory allocator.

make install-mimalloc

For dev env, use make install-mimalloc-dev.

Note: when Mimalloc is built in dev mode, you can dump memory stats with the env var MIMALLOC_SHOW_STATS=1. See https://microsoft.github.io/mimalloc/environment.html .

v8

Lightpanda browser depends on v8 Javascript engine.

This build task is very long and cpu consuming, as you will build v8 from sources.

make get-v8

make build-v8

For dev env, use make build-v8-dev.