Compile Custom SkiaSharp

👉 This skill outlines the specialized procedure for building custom SkiaSharp native assets and managed libraries, which GnollHack uses for its cross-platform rendering engine.

🛠️ Prerequisites

1. Visual Studio: Install Visual Studio with mobile development workloads and the ASP.NET and web development workload.
2. Tizen Extensions:
   • Install Visual Studio Tools for Tizen via Extensions.
   • Install the Tizen Package Manager and then the 7.0 Mobile package.
3. Repository: Clone https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp.git to C:\repos\mono\SkiaSharp.
   • Run git submodule update --init --recursive to fetch dependencies.
4. Tools:
   • Install .NET Cake: dotnet tool install -g cake.tool
   • Install Python 3 via the Microsoft Store.
   • Install 7-zip and LLVM using the provided PowerShell scripts in SkiaSharp\scripts\.
   • Add 7-Zip and LLVM to your PATH environment variable.
5. Environment Variables:
   • Set LLVM_HOME to your LLVM installation path.
   • Set ANDROID_NDK_HOME to your Android NDK path (e.g., C:\Microsoft\AndroidNDK\android-ndk-r23c).

⚙️ Building Native Assets

Android

1. Open PowerShell and navigate to native\android within the SkiaSharp repository.
2. Run dotnet cake.
3. This process invokes the NDK tools to build libSkiaSharp.so and libHarfBuzz.so for the supported Android ABIs. The output is placed in output\native\android\{abi}\.

📦 Building Managed Code (C#)

1. Open PowerShell and navigate to the source directory within the SkiaSharp repository.
2. Run dotnet build.
3. This step compiles the managed C# DLLs which wrap the native SkiaSharp implementations. The resulting libraries will be located in the respective bin directories and can be integrated into GnollHack.