node: prefix breaks my bundler

[martyall]

Is there a good reason to use node:buffer over buffer for foreign module import statements? I'm not an expert, but what I have learned is that both parcel and esbuild seem to have a real problem with this, and iiuc it's not reconized by older versions of node.

[garyb]

Just curious, but why bundle a node app at all?

The node: prefix is there to ensure you're definitely getting the intended module supplied by node and not another package from node_modules with the same name, or something that has been injected into the require cache.

esbuild is fine with it, you just need to provide a --platform=node argument. I'm not sure about parcel.

[garyb]

Oh, and you're right about it not being recognized by older versions of node, but it was introduced in 14.x line. LTS ended for the prior version to that nearly 4 years ago and security updates ended 2 years ago, so it probably shouldn't be used anymore. 😉

[martyall]

What i meant to say is bundling it as a browser application. I have dependencies on purescript-bytestring which require this.

Not gonna lie, I'm not a frontend developer and do know much about these things. What i have noticed is that parcel and esbuild both didn't like this prefix when trying to provide this buffer lib as a polyfill for node:buffer, but when I changed it to simply buffer (e.g. see here) everything worked.

From what I can tell, no other node purescript libs in my deps (e.g. process, crypto, etc) use this node: prefix. I have found various issues concerning this node: prefix for esbuild, but for parcel I don't see anything that works out of the box. Have you ever experienced this problem, is there a straightforward solution?

[JordanMartinez]

From what I can tell, no other node purescript libs in my deps (e.g. process, crypto, etc) use this node: prefix.

In the latest breaking changes, I updated all the Node purescript libs to use the node: prefix as that's what the Node docs say to do in their docs. If I missed one, it was on accident. For example, https://github.com/purescript-node/purescript-node-os/blob/v5.1.0/src/Node/OS.js#L24 and https://github.com/purescript-node/purescript-node-child-process/blob/v11.1.0/src/Node/UnsafeChildProcess/Unsafe.js#L20.

[martyall]

Thanks for looking into this, but in the end I just made the long overdue decision to remove the dependency on purescript-bytestring (no longer maintained) which then fixed the problem. I don't know why that worked, but honestly I don't need to know. 🙇

[garyb]

👍 I feel like it probably shouldn't depend on this if it's not a node specific library, so that's probably the right call until there's a replacement.

[jamesdbrock]

made the long overdue decision to remove the dependency on purescript-bytestring

@martyall I'm not sure about your situation but maybe this would help: https://github.com/rowtype-yoga/purescript-arraybuffer-builder

[martyall]

@jamesdbrock cool, didn't know about that lib. In this case I would use something like that if it also had the equivalent of Haskell's Data.Binary.Get

[jamesdbrock]

In this case I would use something like that if it also had the equivalent of Haskell's Data.Binary.Get

@martyall The equivalent of Data.Binary.Get is https://github.com/rowtype-yoga/purescript-parsing-dataview