Suggestion: drop node 16 (and the node-fetch and ed25519 polyfills)

mikemaccana commented 11 months ago

Motivation

node 16 is already end of life. Current web3.js includes polyfills for fetch and for Ed25519 in global.crypto. Current supported versions of node have both fetch and (from SL on Twitter) Ed25519 support.

Details

Downsides:

Will hurt people using an already end of life version of node. They'll receive the following message on install:

npm WARN EBADENGINE Unsupported engine {
npm WARN EBADENGINE   package: '@solana/web3.js@2.0.0',
npm WARN EBADENGINE   required: { node: '>=18.0.0' },
npm WARN EBADENGINE   current: { node: 'v16.6.0', npm: '9.8.1' }
npm WARN EBADENGINE }

Upsides:

Avoid discussion of polyfills that may or may not be necessary for the users version of node
Reduce additional dependencies
Reduce work by users to remove unnecessary dependencies (I made just-use-native-fetch
Reduce support issues from users using an unsupported node, that probably have other issues

engines in the package.json can be used to specify minimum node versions.

  "engines": {
    "node": ">=18.0.0"
  },

steveluscher commented 11 months ago

I'm a huge fan of making Node LTS+ the requirement, I added this in few packages but seem to have missed some others.

"engine": {
  "node": ">=17.4"
},

I don't know that there's much benefit at this point to churning everyone on the current web3.js. Might as well churn the API and the Node requirement all at once.

mcintyre94 commented 11 months ago

What about browsers though?

On the latest Chrome this is an error:

await window.crypto.subtle.generateKey('Ed25519', false, ['sign'])
Uncaught DOMException: Failed to execute 'generateKey' on 'SubtleCrypto': Algorithm: Unrecognized name

Seems to be behind a feature flag on Chrome: https://chromestatus.com/feature/4913922408710144

Caniuse doesn't seem to have this nuance, but from a quick check Firefox also doesn't work, Safari does.

steveluscher commented 11 months ago

When you try to use generateKeyPair() in the new library, the error message tells you to install and import @solana/webcrypto-ed25519-polyfill.

https://github.com/solana-labs/solana-web3.js/blob/7adc22b1a57cff867d2f735301725dc6384c3e5e/packages/assertions/src/subtle-crypto.ts#L46-L56

solana-labs / solana-web3.js

Suggestion: drop node 16 (and the node-fetch and ed25519 polyfills) #1680

Motivation

Details