Feature request: packaged applications (WARC archives?)

[arcanis]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We're distributing Yarn as a single-file script. While it's great for accessibility, it has an impact on the boot time since Node needs to parse the whole file before even starting to execute it. Additionally, the file is larger than it needs to be because various binary payloads have to be encoded as base64.

Describe the solution you'd like

We'd like to eventually distribute Yarn as a packaged application. Imagine an archive with the source code, and we would call this archive like any other. For Node, the archive would be treated as a directory: node ./yarn.warc/index.js. Given that WARC is on its path to standardization, it seems the most consensual choice.

Prior work

Yarn already provides in-zip filesystem access for the packages it installs. If Node is interested to use Zip instead of WARC we could provide our implementation, which closely follow Node's APIs.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Supporting the __halt_compiler directive would be another way to delegate this responsibility to userland. It would likely be much easier to implement, and would allow for greater flexibility, and tbh I'd very much prefer this approach. Unfortunately, it may require work on the parser level, and I think that would bring it to v8, possibly TC39 lands. Given that the context is almost exclusively relevant to Node, I'm worried it wouldn't go anywhere.

[aduh95]

Supporting the __halt_compiler directive would be another way to delegate this responsibility to userland

I wonder if that's already available using WASM (because the wasm file contains binary data), but I haven't looked it up.

[arcanis]

I wonder if that's already available using WASM (because the wasm file contains binary data), but I haven't looked it up.

That's an interesting idea - I think it could be possible, but only if there was a way for the wasm module to itself execute arbitrary JavaScript code (so that our zip-capable boot logic could then spawn the source it extracted from the embed archive). Since in this scenario we would only distribute the yarn.wasm file, we couldn't provide any binding other than the default ones provided by --experimental-wasm-modules.

[targos]

For Node, the archive would be treated as a directory

Do you mean for module resolution only, or in general? What should happen if someone does fs.readFileSync('yarn.warc/index.js') or fs.writeFileSync('yarn.warc/something.txt', 'some text') ?

Edit: I'm asking this because currently the module system relies heavily on fs operations to do its work.

[arcanis]

Do you mean for module resolution only, or in general? What should happen if someone does fs.readFileSync('yarn.warc/index.js') or fs.writeFileSync('yarn.warc/something.txt', 'some text') ?

With Yarn we only "mount" zip archives as read-only, so we throw EROFS errors on mutations. Read queries (typically readFile, stat, or readdir) all work as you would expect from a regular directory.

[devsnek]

fs is filesystem operations, not WARC operations. at the least I'd expect a separate api for this.

[arcanis]

I don't have any opinion on how it should be presented as a Node API. My "treat archives as a directory" comment only referred to a candidate command line usage:

node ./yarn.warc/index.js

Honestly this is also a fairly inconsequential part of the request, I understand there are other interfaces that could work too. I'd prefer if discussions were around the idea of packaged applications, whether they are a good thing or a bad thing, and what would be the high-level option (WARC, a classic archive, wasm, something else). How it's interfaced can be a followup discussion.

[devsnek]

Once interface types are in V8, it should be possible to write a wasm module which directly imports runInThisContext from vm and invokes it. (It is already possible for the wasm to import that function, it is just unable to directly pass a string without interface types)

[devsnek]

You could also just drop the data into a comment at the end of your file using some high density encoding which can't contain the sequence */.

[andreialecu]

There are some merits for using the ZIP format for packaging applications, having been successfully used in:

• Java: .jar are ZIP files
• Android: .apk files are JAR files (thus ZIP files)
• iOS: .ipa are ZIP files
• macOS: .xip as signed ZIP files

Other advantages are:

• The format can be manipulated in pure JS with help from the built-in zlib module in nodejs. It only consists of a bunch of headers + DEFLATE compression. An example of a pure JS implementation of the zip format: https://github.com/cthackers/adm-zip
• The format is stable, established, well documented and efficient
• Random file access is fast. Zip files keep a "Central Directory" which stores an index of all the files within, with their attributes and permissions (thus behaving like a file system)
• Compression is optional. Zip can be used to simply "store" the files, for performance purposes. Or various levels of compression can be configured, when size is more important.

Treating archives as directories and allowing read-only access to them via the native fs module seems like a solid way to implement this.

There is some prior art in the node ecosystem here as well, @arcanis already mentioned Yarn v2, which successfully monkey patches zip support over nodejs' fs module, and thus allows running JavaScript from within zip files directly without further modifications.

Main downside to using WARC would be that the format is relatively verbose and is generally meant for archieving, as opposed to random access. It wouldn't perform as good as ZIP.

Additionally, editors like vim and emacs can edit files within zip files directly. VSCode can also work with zip files with the help of an extension.

[andreialecu]

Another note on this. The nodejs source repo already includes a full featured native zip implementation (via v8):

https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/deps/v8/third_party/zlib/google/zip.cc

[mhdawson]

@arcanis is what do you have to be in mind in the packaged application? Just modules to be loaded or arbitrary files? If latter what determines where to look in the packaged application or local file system for a file?

[arcanis]

what do you have to be in mind in the packaged application? Just modules to be loaded or arbitrary files? If latter what determines where to look in the packaged application or local file system for a file?

I'm not entirely sure I understood properly, so feel free to ask more details, but the idea would be to run a Node application that would be bundled into a single file. Modules would be included, of course, but other files might be part of it too (for instance, consider an app that would contain a csv data file, or a project generator template). It would have an entry point, similar to how packages have their index.js.

[mhdawson]

Thanks. You answered the first question. What I was trying to understand in the second was the case where the application accesses non-modules files from both the package and outside the package. For example, if it needs to read a csv which is part of the package but then writes out a file to the local file system. When using the fs APIs and I reference a file called "foo" how will Node.js know whether to look in the package for it or the local file system for that file?