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Desktop Native

Desktop Native (DN) is a Rust project that represents all of the native operating system logic used in the Desktop client.

The DN code is effectively a library that is exposed to Electron via napi-rs. See Napi for more information.

Dependencies​

  1. Rust
  2. The nightly toolchain: rustup toolchain install nightly
  3. Cargo binaries for pre-commit hooks

Compiling​

To ensure the code will compile, a faster check than building binaries is to use check.

  cargo check

The binary target can be built as well, however there is marginal gain from that since the compilation as part of running the Desktop electron app will be building the executable code.

  cargo build

Checks​

The following checks are run in CI and also as pre-commit hooks. They can also be run manually.

cargo +nightly fmt --check
cargo +nightly clippy --all-features --all-targets --tests -- -D warnings

Automated testing​

Tests are invoked in CI and can be ran manually with the below commands.

Examples​

Execute the unit and integration tests:

cargo test

Execute the only unit tests:

cargo test --lib

Cross compiling​

Since the Desktop client supports multiple platforms, much of the code is compile-time gated with cfg flags. Cross can be useful to check compilation of non-native OS specific code.

cargo install cross --git https://github.com/cross-rs/cross

Examples​

Check compilation for Linux:

cross check --target  x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Run clippy for Intel Macs:

cross clippy --target x86_64-apple-darwin --all-features --tests

Run unit tests for Windows:

cross test --lib --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

Run integration tests for Apple Silicon Macs:

cross --target aarch64-apple-darwin

Napi​

napi-rs provides an abstraction layer by wrapping the C API that Node.js exposes, in safe Rust bindings. This enables development without having to manually write unsafe FFI.

Most feature crates in the DN workspace have a Napi layer in the project's napi crate source. This Napi layer is compiled as part of the normal build processes, and napi is a standard crate dependency in the project's workspace.

note

In order to actually generate the bindings, building the Desktop client in the parent directory is necessary.