BUILDING.md

Setup

There are a number of prerequisites for building the code in this repo.

Here follow terse descriptions on how to get there.

Setup for Native: The Rust Toolchain

• Follow these instructions to install the Rust toolchain.

  • There are other installation paths, but rustup is heartily recommended.
  • Installing rustup should also install cargo, Rust's day-to-day workhorse tool.
  • Run rustup update both now & occasionally, to get updates to languages & components.

Setup for Web: Node & WebAssembly

• Follow these to install wasm-bindgen.
  • This is the tool that binds Rust and WebAssembly together.
• For sturdiness, we require specific versions of Node.js.
  • To that end, install nvm, the Node Version Manager.
    • Note the instructions on how to enable nvm for your current shell session.
  • Grab a stable node version for general use: nvm install --lts --latest-npm
  • Further down, you will run a script that installs a specific node version for our use.

Fetching the Code

Grab the actual repository:

    > git clone https://github.com/facebookincubator/glTFVariantMeld
    > cd glTFVariantMeld

Generate Rust Binaries

At this point you should be able to run cargo build, which will recurse into ./native where the Rust source lives. Binaries will end up in ./target/debug/.

Generate WebAssembly Package

If you now try:

   > ./build-wasm-pkg.sh

you should end up with a generated NPM package in ./web/wasmpkg/.

You can eyeball it for fun, but we don't do anything with the generated package directly. We just reference it from elsewhere, as per the next section.

Run the Node.js test app

Now simply run:

    > cd web/cli
    > npm install
    > ./build-node-app.sh

This script should make sure you've got NVM installed, and then use it to make sure you're running the recommended Node.js version, then execute the TypeScript-blessed WebPack to generate the required files in ./dist. Something like this:

    > ls -l ./dist
    -rw-r--r--  1 zell  staff    31497 Sep 17 17:05 0.app.js
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 zell  staff    31707 Sep 17 17:05 app.js
    -rw-r--r--  1 zell  staff  1010595 Sep 17 17:05 d4d094458c23e79dfea6.module.wasm

Finally, the script executes dist/app.js which actually runs the app.

Tada! You have built a native library, converted it to WebAssembly, bundled it all into executable JavaScript, and successfully run it. It's not much harder to run it in the browser, but instructions for that will come later.