Documentation / 0.1.0 notes

0.1.0 — first cross-platform release#

Draft. This is what goes in the GitHub release and the npm README banner when 0.1.0 publishes; it is committed so the claims in it are reviewable before they are made rather than written in a hurry against a registry that cannot take them back.

Blitsen is pre-alpha. What follows is written to be true rather than to be attractive.

What ships#

Seven packages, published together: blitsen, which is thin JavaScript, and one runtime package per target, pinned to it exactly.

Download is the compressed platform package: the addon blitsen run loads, the executable an export links into, and the third-party notices for that target's dependency graph. Only one of the six is installed on any machine.

npm i -D blitsen

os and cpu on each runtime package are what make your package manager download only the one your machine needs. There is no postinstall compile step and no Rust toolchain.

Every platform is unsigned#

No artifact in this release is signed, on any platform. No Apple Developer ID and no Windows code-signing certificate exist for this project yet, so the release was built with none and the signing steps recorded that they were skipped.

Inside an npm package this is mostly invisible: neither Gatekeeper nor SmartScreen inspects an addon a package manager downloaded. Where it is visible is an application you export with blitsen build — that is an executable your users launch by name, which is exactly what an OS gatekeeper checks. Sign it yourself, on a host of that platform: --sign takes the command. Nothing here is notarised either (issue #71).

What has been tested, and where#

Three targets run the full suite on every push — linux-x64, darwin-arm64, win32-x64: workspace tests, the native acceptance harnesses, layout conformance, frame determinism and the size gate.

Three run a smoke tier — linux-arm64, darwin-x64, win32-arm64: both release artifacts built, the package tests against them, a frame through the native harness, a standalone export that is built and run, the layout corpus, and a size measurement that reports rather than gates. A regression specific to one of those three is likelier to reach you than one on the first three (issue #133).

Size, cold start and idle RAM are measured on Linux x86-64. The other five targets have no committed baseline yet, so the size gate reports on them and gates nothing.

Built on a patched Blitz#

The renderer is Blitz at 1efe22d2 plus one commit, taken from a fork: replaced layout reaches unreachable!() when a replaced element carries a custom widget, which is what stands between <canvas> and the compositing seam. Filed as blitz#706 and offered upstream as blitz#719; the pin retires when it lands. Every binary here contains that fork's rendering code, and the third-party notices each package carries name it.

Known gaps#

• Node-API wrapper finalizers do not run on Windows, so a long-running Windows application retains every DOM node it has touched (issue #136).
• <canvas> 2D, WebGL/WebGPU, WebRTC, accessibility, IME and cross-platform font fallback are out of scope for this release and tracked in the backlog milestone.
• blitsen doctor reports what the compatibility profile does not cover; read it before assuming an application is inside the profile.

Checking the release#

The only real check is the one that uses the registry rather than the workflow: install blitsen on a machine that has never built it, export an application, and run the artifact. See docs/RELEASING.md.