Native SDK

Native SDK

The Native SDK is the complete toolkit for building native desktop applications. Views are declarative markup in .native files, logic is plain Zig, and the toolkit's own engine draws every pixel into real OS windows — no browser, no WebView, no interpreter in the binary. Every app embeds a deterministic automation server, so agents can snapshot, drive, and screenshot the running window. Desktop is the mature surface (macOS deepest, Linux and Windows exercised in CI); mobile embedding is experimental. WebView surfaces coexist as the optional path for embedding web content or hosting an existing web frontend.

Start here

This file is a discovery stub for agents that installed the Native SDK once with a skills installer such as npx skills add native-sdk. Before implementing or explaining Native SDK app work, use the installed CLI to discover and load the current skill content:

native skills list
native skills get core
native skills get core --full

Use native skills get core for initial orientation. Use native skills get core --full for implementation tasks because it includes the reference files for project anatomy, runtime, frontend assets, bridge/security/native capabilities, packaging, and debugging. Use native skills get automation when testing a running app, taking snapshots, requesting reloads, or using the built-in automation server. Use native skills get zig when zig build fails with "no member named" errors on std APIs — the SDK requires Zig 0.16.0, and that skill maps each pre-0.16 idiom's compile error to the current one.

Quick orientation

npm install -g @native-sdk/cli
native init my_app
cd my_app
native dev

Generated apps center on app.zon, src/app.native (the markup view), and src/main.zig (Model, Msg, update). Inspect those files before editing an existing app; web-frontend shells additionally carry frontend/ and a build.zig.