StarWeb dev log #4

CROSS-PLATFORM SUPPORT AHHH!!! (BOTH MICRO SL.. WINDOWS AND LINUX! and yk it was working before on MacOS)

The socket code was the first problem. Everything was written against BSD sockets, which Windows doesn’t speak. I pulled all of that behind a net.hpp wrapper: a socket_t type, a kInvalidSocket constant, and helpers like net::close, net::is_valid, and set_recv_timeout that pick BSD sockets or Winsock2 depending on platform. Small thing, but an invalid socket is -1 on POSIX and an unsigned INVALID_SOCKET on Windows, so you can’t just reuse the same sentinel value everywhere like I was doing before.

Media playback was the other one. AVFoundation isn’t available outside macOS, so VideoPlayer now has two backends: AVFoundation on macOS, and a FFmpeg + miniaudio backend for Windows/Linux. Same play/pause/seek/volume API.

Alongside that: a CMake build, a BUILDING.md with setup steps per platform, GitHub Actions building targets on push, and a LICENSE + third-party notices file, and that needed to be documented properly instead of just… not. (FFmpeg licensing is so confusing)

Then: flexbox, and input types

Once the cross-platform stuff was done, I went back to layout, which had been held together by manual cursor-position math since day one. I imported Yoga (the flexbox engine Meta built for React Native) and wired it into the renderer through a compute_flex_layout call, so display: flex, gap, and the flex-* properties are now working.

The parser also handles text a lot better now. Before, it just dumped every raw character into text_content, so something like & showed up on the page as & instead of &. Now it decodes entities and splits text into its own #text nodes instead of gluing everything onto the parent tag.

Forms are also better now because of new input types: name, min, max, step, checked, and gave the renderer form controls instead of the placeholder boxes, plus calendar and clock widgets for date/time inputs. Submitting one actually resets and collects values now.

And we know what happens now…