2018-07-22 22:01 GMT+02:00 Nicolas Noble <nico...@nobis-crew.org>: > I need to voice my disagreement with the notion that compilation of addons > is straightforward, by the way, for a few reasons. > > 1) compiling code IS difficult. Planning for every single compiler, edge > case, combinations of libraries, etc is fairly nightmarish. gRPC for > instance is publishing 123 precompiled binaries only for node, and we are > limiting ourselves to a known compiler. > > In fact, a good third of our issues are linked with the compilability of > our addon. >
It's difficult in the general sense, yes, but compiling on a platform like debian/ubuntu/fedora is much easier. > 2) Not everyone WANTS a compiler to be present on their production > machines. This is often viewed as a security risk. > 3) It's time consuming. Compiling the gRPC node extension at the moment > takes roughly 1 to 2 minutes, whereas the downloading of a precompiled > binary is almost instant. For deployment at scale, these are precious CPU > resources being consumed for the sake of recompilation. For development > time, these are frequent "2 minutes" being lost by developers waiting for > their npm dependencies to compile. > Points read and granted, yet i find it very much less risky to recompile than to install foreign binaries. Anyway, since libgrpc is already available as a debian package, why not package directly node-grpc in debian ? Jérémy
