How to use this

You can clone this repo and pull out the dart directory which contains all the headers and libraries you'll need (see Other Notes about some gotchas with these libs).

DartTest2/DartTest2.cpp does all of the embedding work. Note:

• I will be working on simplifying this as much as I can and making the code style consistent. Right now it's all over the place.
• I will be researching what's necessary to perform this embedding without using Dart_RunLoop, since in a game (my target) I can't just have that hang forever. I will adjust this when I figure out how to do it properly.
• I need to check if debugging of imported libraries works. I assume it does, but I need to check.

How I did this

Dart doesn't have anything available that makes embedding easy. The dart.lib and header files included in the SDK are for creating extensions, not for embedding, so unfortunately, you'll have to build it yourself.

Get The Dart Source

Get the Dart SDK source according to the instructions provided at the Dart home page: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/wiki/Building

If you're using Visual Studio 2017 Community (like I am) you'll have to trick depot_tools into using it. Set the following environment variables:

• set GYP_MSVS_VERSION=2015
• set GYP_MSVS_OVERRIDE_PATH=c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\
• set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0

Build the SDK

Just in case, let's make sure everything builds properly.

As of this writing, this just involves doing tools/build.py --mode=release create_sdk

Modify some GN files

Dart needs a lot of extra stuff on top of the VM to get a lot of the embedding story working. Instead of trying to figure out what was necessary and not, I basically created a library that is all of dart.exe minus "main.cc" and called it "dart_lib". To do this:

• Edit runtime/bin/BUILD.gn and copy the template "dart_executable" and the subsequent target "dart"
• Rename the template "dart_runtime_library" change the "dart" target to "dart_lib"
• Add "complete_static_lib = true" to the "static_lib" directive in your new "dart_runtime_library template." This causes GN to bring all of the dependencies into one static library instead of saving them for a final executable.
• Regenerate your ninja files for Dart (buildtools\win\gn.exe gen out\DebugX64)
• Build the library
  • Move to out\DebugX64
  • ninja dart_lib
• The new library will be in out\DebugX64\obj\runtime\bin
• I copied over a bunch of header files into the dart directory locally. You could just reference them directly if you had the dart directory in your include path. You can look in theh repo and see what I needed to copy other than the dart_api headers

Other Notes

I made other changes to GN files to suit my development style. For example, I no longer use the statically linked C runtime when I can avoid it, but dart does. If you are building this for yourself, you may need to change these settings to suit your needs.

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