Not building in electron

[MoonBarc]

Hi!
I'm trying to make a 3D game in javascript, and I'm currently using Three.js and Electron. I was trying to use this with electron, and it installs properly, however when I go into the devtools, it says

The module was compiled against a different Node.js version using
NODE_MODULE_VERSION 83. This version of Node.js requires
NODE_MODULE_VERSION 82. Please try re-compiling or re-installing
the module (for instance, using `npm rebuild` or `npm install`).

and when I try to build it using the electron version, it spits out a bunch of errors. I have tried the electron branch too, with no avail (it's old so i didn't really expect it to work anyway lol)

Thanks!

[laverdet]

We have to wait for Electron to update to nodejs v14.x before isolated-vm will (maybe) be compatible. That's expected some time in November.

[MoonBarc]

Can I use an old version of isolated-vm and electron for the time being?

[laverdet]

I understand electron 2.0.x may work with isolated-vm 1.x, see #132. If you go down that route be sure you're reading the documentation for v1 https://github.com/laverdet/isolated-vm/tree/v1

[MoonBarc]

Does the node 14 branch of electron work? Or is that still in development...? Old electron doesn't have some of the APIs that I need.

[laverdet]

It might work. I contributed nodejs/node@c712fb7 with the intention of making isolated-vm more interoperable with Electron and nodejs. This change was picked up in nodejs v14 so once that's in Electron theoretically isolated-vm will work.

Even with this you would need to fork a new process with ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE and have a non-renderer Electron process [non-Chromium] managing extra isolates. The way v8 is designed it turns out that implementing isolated-vm from within Chrome (or Electron) is really hard. This is also why you can't use worker_threads in Electron: electron/electron#18540.

My suggestion is to invoke child_process.fork from Electron to open a communication channel with a plain nodejs instance:

const { fork } = require('child_process');
const proc = fork('/path/to/node', ['entry.js'], {
  stdio: ['pipe', 'pipe', 'pipe', 'ipc']
});
proc.send('hello');
proc.on('message', message => console.log(message));

You could then communicate with the subprocess using the standard nodejs message passing API. This subprocess would be allowed to use isolated-vm.

[laverdet]

Also I tried to build the nodejs-v14 branch of Electron using the instructions they provided and ran into some errors halfway through the build. I'm sure that rabbit hole runs deep so I stopped there.

[MoonBarc]

Thank you for the info!
What is ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE? Is it just an environment variable that I set?

[laverdet]

It's an environment variable that runs the process with node as the "platform" instead of Chromium. It gets set automatically in the child process when you run child_process.fork from Electron. I think you can set it in the environment but I'm not totally sure how the Chromium renderer and the node process interoperate.

[MoonBarc]

Can confirm that Electron 11 beta works with isolated vm! 🎉

[laverdet]

That's surprising because electron v11.x corresponds to nodejs v12.x which wouldn't have the required platform changes. Could you take a look again and confirm that this is working as expected?

I actually was able to get isolated-vm working on electron-nightly with some minor modifications so it does look like we have a path forward very soon.