libnode: Added C FFI compatible function to act as an entrypoint for embedded consumers

[alshdavid]

Motivation

Hi all,

I have been working on embedding Nodejs in my Rust application to act as a plugin runtime however, while libnode exposes a C++ API, it does not work with consumers that only have access to C FFI calls (like Rust).

Changes

• Added node_start() function in node.cc to proxy node::Start()
  • Enables C bindings to be written for Nodejs

Examples

I created a repo that patches nodejs to add this function, generate static binaries (under GitHub releases) and offers a Rust crate that provides bindings. So far, all I need is this one function added to node.cc.

Usage:

use libnode_rs;

pub fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
  // Register a napi module and inject it into the JavaScript runtime
  libnode_rs::napi_module_register("my_native_extension", |env, exports| exports);

  libnode_rs::eval_blocking(r"
    console.log('Hello World')
    console.log(process._linkedBinding('my_native_extension'))
  ")
}

CC: #52289

[nodejs-github-bot]

Review requested:

• @nodejs/startup