Discussion about the next steps #3

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1. mhdawson commented on Jul 30, 2021

   

   mhdawson

   on Jul 30, 2021

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   +1
2. mhdawson

   closed this as completedin #4on Sep 3, 2021
3. Julusian commented on Jun 5, 2022

   

   Julusian

   on Jun 5, 2022

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   @NickNaso Thank you for creating this!

   I stumbled upon this by accident, while in the middle of overhauling some of the internals of cmake-js. This is a much nicer method than having to download the headers for some arbitrary version of nodejs.

   With a bit of work, I even managed to avoid needing to source a copy of node.lib. Using the symbols information it is possible to generate a compatible version without much difficulty.

   This removes all the downloads that cmake-js used to perform during a build targetting node-api. It also makes me happier about the safety of using node-api as the non node-api headers are no longer available to be included accidentally.
4. NickNaso commented on Jun 6, 2022

   

   NickNaso

   on Jun 6, 2022

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   Hi @Julusian,
   I like to hear your feedback. We created node-api-headers to allow the build of native addon without download all the headers for a specific version of Node.js. This is possible because Node-API is an ABI stable API and it's independent from any Node.js version what matters is the version of Node-API.

   Node-API has some experimental API that are not part of any version because they are not considered stable. We removed from the headers the features e / o functions that are under NAPI_EXPERIMENTAL so this means that if a developer set the NAPI_EXPERIMENTAL flag he will obtain a compilation error.

   I don't know if this could be a problem, but I want to discuss at the next Node-API meeting https://github.com/nodejs/abi-stable-node#meeting. If you have time and want to join us it will be a pleasure to discuss about this together.

   My idea is to use the original Node-API's headers (without removing the experimental feature) and add a new section named EXPERIMENTAL in the symbol.js like reported below:

       EXPERIMENTAL: {
           js_native_api_symbols: [
               // List of symbols in js_native_api.h considered experimental.
           ],
           node_api_symbols: [
             // List of symbols in node_api.h considered experimental.
           ]
       }