Development and licenses

Raven is written in C++20 and lives in native/. The cmd/, pkg/ and internal/ folders hold its first implementation, in Go; new work goes into native/.

Source layout

Path	What it contains
native/main.cpp	The launcher
native/nt	NT services: processes, threads, objects, files, the registry, prefixes and snapshots
native/cpu	The supervised guest process
native/graphics	Vulkan bridge, Wayland presentation and drawing
native/upstream	Components from other projects, each with its notices
scripts	Provisioning, test programs, benchmarks and application checks
docs	Benchmark charts and measurements

Build and test

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build build -j2
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure -j1

ctest --test-dir build -N lists the tests, and -R PATTERN runs a subset. Which tests exist depends on the components your build found.

Historical test result

On October 23, 2026, the recorded CTest run passed 276 of 284 tests, with eight failures and no skipped tests. This is a historical result, not a claim about the current build.

Field	Recorded configuration
Publication revision associated with the audit	21fa2aa2284c8cce9f3b9ae811ee65fcd5134fbf
Build	RelWithDebInfo, RAVEN_SANITIZERS=OFF, two build workers
Test command	ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure -j1
Components	Font-enabled CPU Skia, Liberation fonts with qualified font-hash cache overrides, libpng, Wayland tools, 32/64-bit DXVK, 64-bit vkd3d-proton, installer and common-control components, RTL and certificate roots
Additional inputs	.NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8, XNA, Visual C++ redistributables and Minesweeper supplied separately
Tested runtime SHA-256	8fa0aadace441e65471350de3c0eaf52d3bfa5c3af95b933d154c65b1b0fe197

The revision identifies the publication associated with that audit. The retained result does not establish an exact clean-checkout source revision for the tested binary; the font cache overrides were part of the test configuration. Do not use this count as a prediction for another revision or configuration.

The failures were native_cpu_contracts, native_compatible_bitmap_contract, native_memory_contract, native_d3d12_present_gpu, native_d3d12_fullscreen_gpu, native_d3d11_present_gpu, native_d3d11_fullscreen_gpu and native_x86_d3d11_present_gpu. The last five reported isolated compositor did not start; that error alone does not establish a hardware GPU requirement.

Programs supplied separately

Some tests use software Raven cannot redistribute. Point these variables at your own copies: RAVEN_MINESWEEPER, RAVEN_NETFX_INSTALLER, RAVEN_NETFX35_PACKAGE, RAVEN_XNA_INSTALLER and RAVEN_REDIST_DIRECTORY; the Go checks also read RAVEN_NOTEPAD and RAVEN_DXBALL. Tests whose input is missing are skipped.

Contributing

The most useful contribution is one program that does not work, the command that shows it and what you expected. A small test program that reproduces the same behaviour is even better. For window and drawing changes, include a screenshot.

Licenses

Raven’s own code is under the MIT License. The components in native/upstream and the files derived from them keep their own licenses and notices (GPL, LGPL, BSD, libpng, Unicode and Skia), and a build that includes them follows those terms too. The bitmap font from Go Mono carries the Bigelow & Holmes notice. The website font has its license in /fonts/LICENSE.txt.