How to use Deno as a Rust crate but with the complete Node & Deno standard library, module resolution, commonjs support, etc?

[alshdavid]

I am writing a bundler in Rust and am looking for a runtime to embed in my binary to execute JavaScript based plugins with.

Deno is written in Rust and offers the deno_core crate which offers a basic execution context for JavaScript applications.

It's pretty great and easy to use however, looking through the examples, it appears very bare bones - offering only an execution context, where I must separately implement the Node standard library, module resolution, commonjs support and so on.

I could copy those features from the Deno repo and reimplement the usage as described in the Deno executable - but I was wondering if there was already a way to do this without manually rewiring a complete form of Deno in my own project.

Or have I misunderstood deno_core and it actually has batteries included? 😓

[bartlomieju]

deno is only available as a binary target (ie. you can't use it as a library). You can use some parts of it via deno_runtime crate, but not all the things that you want will be available there.

[alshdavid]

As a follow up to this. I haven't had success embedding Deno into my Rust application beyond integrating it to evaluate basic JavaScript. My efforts to fork Deno CLI or use the new/unstable deno_lib crate were plagued with issues so I gave up.

I was, however, able to compile Nodejs to a dynamic C library (prebuilt binaries here), added Rust bindings and a high level Rust API (with async Rust support).

I'm keeping up to date on Deno's progress and if things change I'll happily migrate to Deno. My hope is to compile Deno to a static or dynamic C library (to avoid collisions with dependencies), offer prebuilt binaries & rust bindings along with a high level Rust API.

Deno's opt system is quick fiddly, so I would probably rely on the Nodejs compat and write the high level API against Node's n-api