Add support for node native addons / napi / FFI in deno compile

[marvinhagemeister]

Discussed in #23255

^{Originally posted by babakfp April 6, 2024}
Hi 👋

parcel-bundler/lightningcss#712

Based on this comment parcel-bundler/lightningcss#712 (comment) and this:

(I used this library https://deno.land/x/abc@v1.3.3 and when I compiled, it started to download this ^ file).

It seems like Deno doesn't do the same for lightningcss.

Search keywords:

• TypeError: LoadLibraryExW failed

[bartlomieju]

I don't expect this to work. FFI/native Node extensions can't be included in the the compiled binary.

[AddictArts]

As a data point I ran into similar with electron-builder and now with deno. For elextron-builder I used asar.upacked which essentially put a node_modules and native within. Seems like deno should or maybe could do the same?

[Dmitri-Sintsov]

I don't expect this to work. FFI/native Node extensions can't be included in the the compiled binary.

Why not? These work with non-compiled source runtime. Anyway, in case these cannot be easily included, maybe the compiler could add these native modules as separate files to load them when running resulting binary? That would be much better than nothing.

[kt3k]

I wonder if we can support loading native addons using --include flag of compile command. Did anyone try that?

[funnylookinhat]

@kt3k I was wondering the same thing, but I think that would fail to properly support the --target parameter. I am pretty sure your local node_modules will be built only for your active architecture. As an example, if you were running on an M1 Mac and compiling for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, the binaries you include would not run properly in the resulting binary.

[sigmaSd]

@kt3k it doesn't work it can't dlopen embedded files, the workaround is to copy the file to the host system before dl opening it

[sigmaSd]

Bun for example does handle this pretty well, even complex napi projects like slint just works, bun compile produce a single executable that have the library bundled and it does dlopen it at runtime correctly