Windows Support (and Fewer Dependencies)

[shiftkey]

I've started on a branch here which has a few goals:

• first-class support for Windows
• remove the requirement for ICU to be installed on the user's machine
• add some tests to ensure it's working for each supported platform

I can see there's some related issues around Window support: #2 #27

So far it's proceeding nicely:

C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector>if not defined npm_config_node_gyp (node "C:\Program Files\nodejs\node_modules\npm\bin\node-gyp-bin\\..\..\node_modules\node-gyp\bin\node-gyp.js" rebuild )  else (node "" rebuild )
Building the projects in this solution one at a time. To enable parallel build, please add the "/m" switch.
  node-icu-charset-detector.cpp
  win_delay_load_hook.cc
..\node-icu-charset-detector.cpp(44): warning C4267: 'argument': conversion from 'size_t' to 'int32_t', possible los
s of data [C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector\build\node-icu-charset-detector.vcxproj]
..\node-icu-charset-detector.cpp(77): warning C4530: C++ exception handler used, but unwind semantics are not enable
d. Specify /EHsc [C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector\build\node-icu-charset-detector.vcxpr
oj]
c:\users\shiftkey\documents\github\node-icu-charset-detector\node_modules\nan\nan_new.h(214): warning C4267: 'argume
nt': conversion from 'size_t' to 'int', possible loss of data (compiling source file ..\node-icu-charset-detector.cp
p) [C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector\build\node-icu-charset-detector.vcxproj]
  ..\node-icu-charset-detector.cpp(95): note: see reference to function template instantiation 'v8::MaybeLocal<v8::S
  tring> Nan::New<v8::String,const char*,size_t>(A0,A1)' being compiled
          with
          [
              A0=const char *,
              A1=size_t
          ]
     Creating library C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector\build\Release\node-icu-charset-de
  tector.lib and object C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector\build\Release\node-icu-charset-
  detector.exp
  Generating code
  Finished generating code
  node-icu-charset-detector.vcxproj -> C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector\build\Release\\n
  ode-icu-charset-detector.node
node-icu-charset-detector@0.2.0 C:\Users\shiftkey\Documents\GitHub\node-icu-charset-detector

A couple of questions:

• Is this something you're interested in supporting? I know Windows things can be a hassle without having access to the OS, so perhaps I can help with setting up some continuous integration...
• Is there anything I should be aware of to help make this easy for you to review when I do open a PR?
• Are you fine with me only testing this on Node 6 (LTS) and 7 (current)?

[ccoenen]

I'm not on this project's team, but I just came here to find out about the state of windows support. So seeing your work makes me very hopeful.

[shiftkey]

@ccoenen given the amount of silence right now I'll probably publish this up to a scoped package under my NPM account when it's ready to consume. Stay tuned.

[mooz]

@shiftkey Sorry for the delayed response. This is an exciting news! I appreciate your effort.

Is this something you're interested in supporting?

I'm happy to support Windows. Since I don't use Windows (as a development environment), I would be happy if you can help me setting CI env. I can add you to developers for giving a privilege to this repository.

Is there anything I should be aware of to help make this easy for you to review when I do open a PR?

Nothing.

Are you fine with me only testing this on Node 6 (LTS) and 7 (current)?

That's fine.

[shiftkey]

I can add you to developers for giving a privilege to this repository.

That'd be great. I've used Appveyor for this sort of thing in the past. I'll get that working as part of the PR.

[ccoenen]

I would like to express my sincere thanks to both of you! It's details like this that make JavaScript my current go-to language.

[shiftkey]

I have a more stable development branch underway here which is getting close to opening a PR targeting this repository - master...shiftkey:dev

Done:

• Windows support
• Linux support (probably needs some refinement)
• Continuous Integration - example Travis build and example Appveyor build
• Integration tests verifying non-UTF-8 files on all platforms (to ensure we're using ICU correctly)

Remaining tasks are mostly related to how ICU4C is distributed:

• Windows - unpack pre-built ICU4C as part of npm install, drop custom CI setup and environment variables
• macOS - obtain pre-built ICU4C (or just build it from source), unpack as part of npm install, drop brew install dependency
• Linux - obtain pre-built ICU4C, unpack as part of npm install, drop apt-get install dependency

Once I've closed out these tasks, I'll make a scoped package available for others to help with testing, while we talk about getting these changes incorporated into the upstream project...

[shiftkey]

Hey gang, I'm actually not going to move ahead with improving this project, because I think a perfectly fine solution already exists leveraging iconv-lite and jschardet. You can see a sample of this here: atom/node-pathwatcher#120