Darwin bindings binary not working

[darul75]

Hello,

This might also be related to other discussions.

Developing a Vscode extension relying on SerialPort when I rebuild the Serialport from scratch to make it fully compatible with Vscode and the embedded Electron version it works fine but not with the binary you provide in your releases, so I was wondering if that is expected.

Here are my vscode settings (latest version I guess)

Version: 1.63.0 (Universal)
Commit: 7db1a2b88f7557e0a43fec75b6ba7e50b3e9f77e
Date: 2021-12-07T05:15:48.091Z
Electron: 13.5.2
Chromium: 91.0.4472.164
Node.js: 14.16.0
V8: 9.1.269.39-electron.0
OS: Darwin x64 19.6.0

By downloading your provided binding files (like here), it would give me the following error

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: __ZN2v816FunctionTemplate3NewEPNS_7IsolateEPFvRKNS_20FunctionCallbackInfoINS_5ValueEEEENS_5LocalIS4_EENSA_INS_9SignatureEEEiNS_19ConstructorBehaviorENS_14SideEffectTypeEPKNS_9CFunctionEhhh Referenced from: /myproject..../node_modules/@serialport/bindings/build/bindings.node Expected in: flat namespacedyld: Symbol not found: __ZN2v816FunctionTemplate3NewEPNS_7IsolateEPFvRKNS_20FunctionCallbackInfoINS_5ValueEEEENS_5LocalIS4_EENSA_INS_9SignatureEEEiNS_19ConstructorBehaviorENS_14SideEffectTypeEPKNS_9CFunctionEhhh Referenced from: /myproject/node_modules/@serialport/bindings/build/bindings.node Expected in: flat namespace

Then if I built it manually using a command like

electron-rebuild --version=13.5.2

It works like a charm.

Any ideas?

[reconbot]

We might not be building for that version of electron. But do try the serialport@beta release. That will give you v10 which uses napi and should "just work"

[darul75]

I was tempted to give it a go and will, what is napi at the end? just for the sake of understanding it a bit more

[reconbot]

NAPI

so.. each version of nodejs and electron has a different set of c++ apis that we need to compile to. We call this an ABI (application binary interface). As long as you have the right version between the library (serialport) and js engine (v8 inside of electron & node) they'll be able to call the right functions and work properly.

With each new version of v8 the abi changes and we have to produce a new version of node serialport, this sucks. Also keeping track of what version of the ABI each environment needs is a real pain and the tooling we have occasionally makes mistakes. (See the recent issues around node17 and electron not working to name a few)

NAPI has a stable ABI, which means it wont change between releases of v8. Which means when you upgrade electron, serialport should just keep working!

[darul75]

nice so looks like napi will be a kind of commitment from the community and the v8 engine facing api. thanks for these explanations.

[reconbot]

serialport@10.2.2 has been released - it's a slightly different api (docs are pending) but it's typescript so that might lead you the right direction.