(feat) Chromium-graal

[frank-dspeed]

I am wondering there is

• NW.JS https://nwjs.io/ => which has a nodejs fork that uses chromium and its v8 (Always most current versions!)
• Electron => Chromium and Nodejs uses the nodejs v8 (Outdated NodeJS and Chromium)

and you already got node-graal so is it possible that you could also effort to create chromium graal? I am only asking because i invest much time into electron nwjs and chromium and came to the conclusion that graal already is everything that nodejs should be.

so i could focus on chromium+graal ?

[wirthi]

Hi Frank,

we put some investigation into Electron (but I don't think we ever looked into nw.js). For Electron, this is already a while back (1-2 years?) and the outcome was that it would be significant effort to get it fully working on GraalVM.

There were some architectural issues at the time (IIRC correctly, Electron used two different versions of V8 at the time, one directly and one indirectly via Node.js or Chromium?); but most importantly, Electron directly binds to the native C interface (V8.h) of V8. Node.js of course does the same - for that purpose, we have implemented everything Node.js uses from V8.h in our own mockup of V8.h (where Graal.js pretends to be a suitable V8 implementation). But we left everything out that we don't need for Node.js - V8.h is bigger than what Node.js actually uses. And of course, Electron uses some portion of that functionality. To get Electron fully working, you will actually need to implement those missing features in our V8.h mockup; some of that will be trivial, some might be larger missing features.

We are happy to help you with any effort you might put into that, but I don't think we would directly allocate significant resources to work into that direction in the near future.

Best,
Christian

[frank-dspeed]

@wirthi you should look into nwjs it has less patches and is maintainable i agree electron is a mess i was just wondering. I have not the build capacity to iterate fast over chromium i also have no access to the distributed build env for chromium (goma)

it would need a much bigger pc.

[frank-dspeed]

Working internal on that,