@driftengine/native-host

The engine on a native window and a native WebGPU device, with no browser between them.

A game built on the engine runs here unchanged. The host is Node, Dawn — the WebGPU implementation Chrome runs — through @kmamal/gpu, SDL through @kmamal/sdl for the window, input and controllers, and Web Audio from node-web-audio-api. Around the canvas it supplies the page a game expects: window, document, animation frames, the browser's input events in the order Chrome sends them, pointer lock, fullscreen, gamepads, matchMedia, and the desktop shell's bridge (__driftHost) for storage, window modes and quit.

A game installs it and the packager ships it. npm install @driftengine/native-host in the game, at the engine's version, and drift-package build --target=native-linux-x64 bundles the game with it into an archive that carries its own Node. The packager names no range on this package and resolves it from the game's own tree, so a game that builds only for the browser or for Electron never downloads a native binary.

A game's contract with it is one export. In a browser a page finds its canvas in its markup; here there is no markup, so the manifest's native.entry names a module exporting mount(canvas), and the host calls it with its canvas once it has started. A game that already mounts onto a canvas it is given needs a file of one line:

export { mount } from './game.ts';

runGame is that start, and what the packager's generated entry calls; startHost is the same start without a game, for a tool that draws its own frames. tileFiles(dir) is the one thing a page has no equivalent of: the texture streamer's tiles read from a directory on disk, for a native entry to hand its streamer where a page would fetch them.

What it is measured against

Every published scene is drawn by this host and by Chrome and compared pixel for pixel on the same machine (npm run native:gate in the engine's repository). The engine's reference mix is compared against Chrome's too. Each behaviour a page reads — an event's order, a refusal's wording, a double click's timing — is Chrome's, measured over the DevTools protocol where it can be, and asserted by a test beside the module that implements it.

What it gives up

• Linux x64 is the platform it has been measured on, and the one the packager builds for. Windows and macOS come after 4.0.0: the three bindings publish binaries for both, and what each still needs is a launcher, its signing, and the same measurements against Chrome on its own GPU.
• There is no DOM beyond the canvas: document.createElement refuses by name, so a game's own HTML interface does not come with it.
• WebGL2 is not offered; the engine runs on WebGPU here.
• Clip export, navigator.share and WebXR are absent, and the engine says so where it asks.
• The engine's badge is not drawn, and there is no store: steam.appId does nothing here, which drift-package doctor says for a manifest that sets it.
• Pipelines are compiled on every start, because the binding exposes no cache for them: most of the start of a small program, 355 ms of 750 measured on 2026-09-19.

Apache-2.0. Dawn, SDL, Node and the Web Audio engine carry their own licences, which a packaged game ships in its licenses/ with every other part's. One of them is the LGPL: the Opus decoder reads Ogg pages with codec-parser, which is LGPL-3.0, so a packaged game carries it as a file of its own that a person can replace rather than inside the bundle, with the GPL's text beside it — licenses/GPL-3.0.txt in this package, which that licence asks to accompany it.