17xande.dev web2sdi

Building

Building the Windows binaries and the installer, from Linux.

Everything is built from Linux, including the Windows binaries and the installer: no Visual Studio, no Windows CI, no Docker.

What it is made of

  • Zig 0.16 for the core, and build.zig for the build.
  • Thin C++20 shims around the two C++ SDKs: CEF and the DeckLink SDK. Each exposes a flat C API that Zig calls directly.
  • Deno + TypeScript + Web Awesome for the control page. Its built output is committed, so building the appliance needs only Zig.

The builds

zig build web                                             # only after editing web/
zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-windows-gnu -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe
zig build installer                                       # packages zig-out/bin (needs makensis)

zig build --help lists the rest, including web-check, web-test and web-watch for the control page.

zig build installer does not rebuild first. Which target and optimise mode ship is worth deciding on purpose, and a packaging step that quietly rebuilds is one that quietly ships a Debug binary.

After the Windows build, zig-out/bin/ holds web2sdi.exe, dltest.exe and Chromium's runtime, about 460MB of it. To run without the installer, copy the whole directory to the target — as one archive, if it is going over the network.

Chromium

The Windows build uses an official CEF binary distribution (the minimal one is enough), at the same version as the Linux development build so both run identical Chromium.

-Dcef-win-dist points the build at a different distribution. That is also the way to get H.264: official CEF builds leave proprietary codecs out, but a distribution built with them — as OBS builds its own — can be dropped in without building Chromium here. Two things to weigh first: the A/V calibration is specific to a Chromium version, and H.264 is patent-encumbered, with the obligation falling on whoever distributes the decoder.

zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-windows-gnu -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe \
  -Dcef-win-dist=/path/to/cef_binary_..._windows64

More

The full engineering record — milestones, measurements, the Windows port's findings and the known risks — is PLAN.md in the repository.