evo-webview

This is a modified fork of webview/webview. Please see the original readme here.

Goals

The main purpose of this fork is to make my life easier by eliminating the biggest pain points that I've experienced while integrating WebViews into the evo Lua runtime.

Since this requires some drastic changes, the rationale for them is outlined below.

Migration to ObjectiveC++ on Mac OS

For what I assume is portability reasons, all the OSX-specific platform code was written using the Objective-C runtime C APIs. These are extremely low-level, can fail spectacularly at runtime, and make the development experience quite miserable.

Abandonment of the Header-only Paradigm

Because it's problematic to integrate the header-only library into a multi-language project with the original design, I decided to move away from this model and split the header into multiple files that can be built as a regular (static or dynamic) library.

Introduction of a CMake-based Build System

Look, I dislike CMake as much as the next guy. But homebrew scripts isn't it. The main idea here is to make the library easier to consume (as a static library). May revert later; some people have suggested Meson as an alternative but I haven't looked into it yet.

Dropping Support for Go and SWIG-generated Bindings

I just don't need any of these, and I don't know the first thing about them. My use case involves accessing the library from Lua, and I support C/C++ alongside that by sheer necessity. Everything else is up for grabs. If there's interest... "PRs welcome", I guess?

CMake Build Instructions

We could probably do better, but this should work in principle:

# Create build files using the Ninja build generator
cmake -S . -B cmakebuild -G Ninja
# Build static library
cmake --build cmakebuild
# Run tests
cd cmakebuild && ctest

When in doubt, check the Build Workflows. They are the only authoritative way of building the library as far as I'm concerned, as they're run on every Pull Request.

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Here's an example showing how the library can be included in your CMake project:

• Tests/Fixtures/WebViewTestApp/CMakeLists.txt

Including without CMake

You can simply add the include/ directory, then import the desired API:

#include "webview.h" // Provides the C API only
#include "webview.hpp" // Provides both the C and the C++ API