consider node.js binding

[2bndy5]

Recently, I discovered napi-rs which generates bindings from rust code to WASM targets. I believe it could be used in conjunction with github's octokit library[^1] because it would be installable via npm.

[^1]: The official API used to implement native actions agnostic of the runner's OS, not for composite or docker actions

[2bndy5]

I looked into this. It might be possible with a thin TS wrapper that (collects all the action inputs and then) calls into the rust run_main() entrypoint. One of the other problems is with how to create output variables using @action/core (from octokit ecosystem).

I'm not going to persuing this. The napi-rs project is setup to create libraries installed via npm only. I don't think its engineered to be used as an executable wrapper.

[2bndy5]

It would probably be easier to write a javascript action using dart's JS interoperability (generates javascript code from dart code). But I pretty much abandoned the cpp_linter_dart experiment when I learned the glory of rust.

[2bndy5]

I'm reopening this because I think I found a way to do this. I'm still investigating, but I have a branch that employs the neon package to generate a native node.js module from the cpp-linter lib... See node-binding/ directory in the new branch.

The tricky parts are

• building and distributing the binding. The neon docs do not talk about this. I think that it relies on npm publish command. I think that's what the neon CLI repo seems to do for releases.
• incorporating the built native module into the @actions/core package (which is used to get action inputs). Again the neon docs are vague here. There seems to be a way to import node.js builtin functions, but it doesn't talk about using third-party libraries from npm. I think I need to publish the native module as a separate package, and then I would publish another pure JS package that imports the native module and @actions/core package.

[2bndy5]

Success! 🎉

It took me a while to figure out all the steps performed in publishing platform-specific packages, but it works now. See npmjs page.

With Attestation

---

Going forward I think I can create another package (call it @cpp-linter/gh-action) that doesn't require a special install step and uses the @cpp-linter/cpp-linter pkg as a dependency. My aim is to have something like the following (in cpp-linter-action/action.yml):

- uses: cpp-linter/cpp_linter_rs/gh-action@v2.0.0
  with:
    version: ${{ inputs.version }}
    thread-comments: ${{ inputs.thread-comments }}
    # ...