How does cross-compilation work with native addons ?

[jlebras]

Hello,

I'm using pkg to build an exe for win64.
When building from Windows itself it works perfectly but our CI is Linux and generates an exe that fails to start with ERR_DLOPEN_FAILED.

Our project uses serialport and we have an error when loading @serialport/bindings/build/Release/bindings.node .
The file exists but is not compatible with Windows (I think).
Different file sizes between what I find in .cache/pkg and what I have in my node_modules on Windows. (75ko in pkg cache vs 220ko)

So my question is how does pkg handles that ? because our npm ci in the Linux environment should install linux bindings and not Windows related stuff.

[robertsLando]

@jlebras see issue #87

[jlebras]

Thanks, but I think my problem was related to how serialport was loading the binding.
On v10+ they added an auto-detect feature which gets the correct binding for the current platform at runtime, we were using v9.

After updating (and some fixes to adapt to breaking changes) the exe starts normally without DLOPEN errors and works as intended.

[robertsLando]

I usually just add all the serialport bindings to the assets

[jlebras]

Yes, that's what I did, but serialport runtime behaviour seems different between v9 and v10+, not related to pkg :)

I'm quite new to packaging nodejs apps and I first tried the built-in SEA feature, but it's clearly not working with native addons.
I had to keep some external node_modules aside from the exe and create a special require function for those modules, which is not what we want and is a pain to compress/decompress.
Pkg really helps here with its vfs and the "auto-extract" in its cache folder.

[robertsLando]

Yeah SEA feature is really limited, pkg it's still the best solution for nodejs applications :)