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Version: v3.0.0-preview

The Silk.NET Contributors Guide

Welcome to the Silk.NET project! We're so glad you want to help us create the best native interoperation experience that .NET has ever seen.

This contributors guide covers many topics about Silk.NET's internals in great detail to help anyone pick up any part of the codebase and hit the ground running.

Table of Contents​

Getting Started​

Prerequisites​

To get started, first clone Silk.NET using git clone https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET --depth 1. Your development environment will need the latest production-ready .NET SDK, so make sure you've installed that from get.dot.net. We also recommend installing NUKE using dotnet tool install -g NUKE.GlobalTool to enable our auxiliary build commands/utilities, but this is optional and in fact can be accessed using the ./build.sh/.\build.cmd/.\build.ps1 scripts in place of nuke in usages in this guide without installing the tool.

If you'd like to build and/or work with the mobile support in Silk.NET, you'll need to install the workloads using dotnet workload restore. It is highly likely you need to prefix this with sudo on macOS and Linux. In addition, you'll need to install the Android SDK with API 34 and API 35 support to ensure a successful build. Furthermore, on macOS you will need Xcode installed with the iOS platform installed. Alternatively, if you don't want to work with our mobile support, you can disable it for your local builds using nuke disable-platforms --platforms android ios for example. The acceptable values for --platforms are any valid platform identifiers (i.e. right-hand side of the - of a TargetFramework, without platform version information).

We automatically disable iOS support on Linux, as these workloads are only available on Windows and macOS. For more information about the NUKE utilities, consult the Build System documentation or use nuke --help.

Building from Source​

Assuming you've got the prerequisites installed, dotnet build! Or dotnet pack to produce all the NuPkgs in artifacts/pkg.

To learn more about the build system, see the Build System documentation. It is intentionally designed to be as compatible as possible with the regular dotnet build system such that you can use the built-in utilities of your favourite IDE.

Regenerating Bindings​

You can regenerate bindings using NUKE with nuke regenerate-bindings, but this isn't recommended. A full regeneration of Silk.NET takes a long time and has the potential to touch the vast majority of the files that make up Silk.NET and/or create loads of unrelated changes in your working tree. Instead, it is preferred to run SilkTouch manually using a command like dotnet run --project sources/SilkTouch/SilkTouch/Silk.NET.SilkTouch.csproj -c Release -- generator.json -s Job1 -s Job2 ... where the values for the -s arguments are replaced with the job names (the keys of the Jobs dictionary in generator.json e.g. SDL, OpenGL, etc).

For more information on SilkTocuh arguments, consult the SilkTouch User Guide or use dotnet run --project sources/SilkTouch/SilkTouch/Silk.NET.SilkTouch.csproj -- --help.