What are the dependencies of SEAs?

[jannis-baum]

Hello! My project Vivify relies on Node SEA and I have a CI there that builds the executable which I then publish through Homebrew. What's the correct way of knowing which dependencies my executable will have?

Up until now I've been using whatever Homebrew dependencies the node I use to build it has with brew deps --installed --direct node. However, in the last release this seems to have diverged. The node dependencies were

brotli
c-ares
icu4c@77
libnghttp2
libnghttp3
libngtcp2
libuv
openssl@3
simdjson
sqlite
uvwasi
zstd

but then running my executable leads to

dyld[94172]: Library not loaded: /opt/homebrew/opt/simdutf/lib/libsimdutf.26.dylib
  Referenced from: <D70D595D-7518-36D5-AF8C-376A12B199A4> /opt/homebrew/Cellar/vivify/0.10.0/bin/vivify-server
  Reason: tried: '/opt/homebrew/opt/simdutf/lib/libsimdutf.26.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/opt/homebrew/opt/simdutf/lib/libsimdutf.26.dylib' (no such file), '/opt/homebrew/opt/simdutf/lib/libsimdutf.26.dylib' (no such file)
zsh: abort      /opt/homebrew/bin/vivify-server

because it apparently also depends on the package simdutf. If I install that it works. How do I find the correct dependencies?

[jannis-baum]

Something like

otool -L the-executable \
    | sed -n 's|^[[:space:]]*/opt/homebrew/opt/\([^/]*\)/.*$|\1|p' \
    | uniq

could do it for the Homebrew dependencies

[jannis-baum]

Something like

otool -L the-executable
| sed -n 's|^[[:space:]]/opt/homebrew/opt/([^/])/.*$|\1|p'
| uniq

could do it for the Homebrew dependencies

This doesn't work because it can't resolve versions. Just yesterday simdjson was updated on Homebrew dropping libsimdjson.26.dylib completely with no version tags to still get it back, i.e. you would need to find the commit hash for Homebrew which is super far from being feasibly automatable.

This unfortunately makes distributing pre-built Node SEA binaries essentially useless on macOS. For now I switched to building locally in the Homebrew package but I think long term if there's no good way of handling this that I'm missing we will need to switch away from Node.

[cspotcode]

Do the homebrew binaries have more dependencies than other binaries, say, those from nodejs.org?

[jannis-baum]

Do the homebrew binaries have more dependencies than other binaries, say, those from nodejs.org?

Good question! I'll try that out and get back to you

[jannis-baum]

Do the homebrew binaries have more dependencies than other binaries, say, those from nodejs.org?

Looks like they do have a lot more dependencies! Building using actions/setup-node@v5 I get only

vivify-server:
	/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (compatibility version 150.0.0, current version 3038.1.255)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Versions/A/Security (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 61439.1.1)
	/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1800.101.0)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1351.0.0)

And if I use Homebrew Node I get

/opt/homebrew/bin/vivify-server:
	/usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.12)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/libuv/lib/libuv.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/simdjson/lib/libsimdjson.27.dylib (compatibility version 27.0.0, current version 27.0.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/brotli/lib/libbrotlidec.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.1.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/brotli/lib/libbrotlienc.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.1.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/c-ares/lib/libcares.2.dylib (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 2.19.4)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/libnghttp2/lib/libnghttp2.14.dylib (compatibility version 44.0.0, current version 44.1.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/libnghttp3/lib/libnghttp3.9.dylib (compatibility version 9.0.0, current version 9.4.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/libngtcp2/lib/libngtcp2.16.dylib (compatibility version 23.0.0, current version 23.0.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/sqlite/lib/libsqlite3.dylib (compatibility version 9.0.0, current version 9.6.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/uvwasi/lib/libuvwasi.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/zstd/lib/libzstd.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.5.7)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/openssl@3/lib/libcrypto.3.dylib (compatibility version 3.0.0, current version 3.0.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/openssl@3/lib/libssl.3.dylib (compatibility version 3.0.0, current version 3.0.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/icu4c@77/lib/libicui18n.77.dylib (compatibility version 77.0.0, current version 77.1.0)
	/opt/homebrew/opt/icu4c@77/lib/libicuuc.77.dylib (compatibility version 77.0.0, current version 77.1.0)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (compatibility version 150.0.0, current version 3423.0.0)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Versions/A/Security (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 61439.101.1)
	/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1900.178.0)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1351.0.0)

So thanks a lot, I think this solves my problem! The dependencies of the Node-distributed version seem fair enough.