Installation

suit targets Scala Native and renders through SDL3, so there are three things to have in place: the Scala Native toolchain, the native SDL3 libraries, and the suit sources themselves.

Requirements

• Scala 3 with sbt
• The sbt-scala-native and sbt-scala-native-crossproject plugins
• LLVM/Clang (the Scala Native toolchain)
• The SDL3, Cairo, and FreeType shared libraries on your system

Install the native libraries

suit’s runtime links against system libraries via @link: SDL3 (window, input, present, through the sdl3 bindings), Cairo (the drawing engine), and FreeType (font loading). On macOS with Homebrew:

brew install sdl3 cairo

Cairo depends on FreeType, so Homebrew pulls it in alongside. On Linux, install the SDL3, Cairo, and FreeType development packages from your distribution (or build them from source).

Get the sources

suit depends on two sibling repositories, both checked out next to it:

• riposte — supplies the vdom core. suit consumes its JVM and Native cross-targets as a source dependency (vdomJVM / vdomNative), because those targets are not published; only vdom.js is on Central.
• sdl3, libcairo, and freetype — the SDL3, Cairo, and FreeType bindings, pulled from Maven Central.

git clone https://github.com/edadma/riposte.git
git clone https://github.com/edadma/suit.git

The expected layout is the two repos side by side:

dev/
├── riposte/      # provides vdomJVM / vdomNative (source dependency)
└── suit/         # this repo

suit’s build.sbt references riposte by relative path:

.jvmConfigure(_.dependsOn(ProjectRef(file("../riposte"), "vdomJVM")))
.nativeConfigure(_.dependsOn(ProjectRef(file("../riposte"), "vdomNative")))

and pulls SDL3 from Central:

.nativeSettings(
  libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
    "io.github.edadma" %%% "sdl3"     % "0.2.3",
    "io.github.edadma" %%% "libcairo" % "0.0.4",
    "io.github.edadma" %%% "freetype" % "0.0.4",
  ),
)

Verify the setup

Run the headless layout suite on the JVM — it needs no window, no device, and no native toolchain, because the layout engine is pure Scala:

sbt suitJVM/test

Then build the native demo and run it (see the quick start):

sbt suitNative/run

If a window opens showing the widget demo, the toolchain and SDL3 are wired correctly.