node-csv VS node-ffi-napi

I still use it a lot, particularly in unit tests and configuration. Take the tests of the CSV package, for example https://github.com/adaltas/node-csv/blob/master/packages/csv..., once you get used to its syntax, it is easier to read than plain JS. For Nikita, TypeScript would be appealing for code completion. In term of type checking, it will be double usage since all arguments are checked at runtime with JSON schema.

I actually came from AutoHotKey as well, specifically for the cross platform support!

I've found the dev experience with nut.js to be worlds ahead of AutoHotKey as well. You get to use a real programming language with proper modules, data structures, first-class functions, asynchrony, and have access to a vast ecosystem of third party libraries and tooling.

Some Windows specific APIs are easier to work with on AHK due to the collection of built-in functions specifically tailored for automation, but everything AHK is still possible with nut.js since you're just writing a node.js script and have access to libraries like https://github.com/node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi that can call native system libraries, with a bit more work involved.

> check out the Web X-Ray repo <https://github.com/mozilla/goggles.mozilla.org/>.

Thanks for example. Peeking a bit under the hood, it appears to be due to transitive dependencies referencing github urls (and transient ones at that) instead of semver, which admittedly is neither standard nor good practice...

FWIW, simply removing `"grunt-contrib-jshint": "~0.4.3",` from package.json and related jshint-related code from Gruntfile was sufficient to get `npm install` to complete successfully. The debugging just took me a few minutes grepping package-lock.json for the 404 URL in question (https://github.com/ariya/esprima/tarball/master) and tracing that back to a top-level dependency via recursively grepping for dependent packages. I imagine that upgrading relevant dependencies might also do the trick, seeing as jshint no longer depends on esprima[0].

I'm not sure how representative this particular case is to the sort of issues you run into, but I'll tell that reproducibility issues can get a lot worse in ways that committing deps doesn't help (for example, issues like this one[1] are nasty to narrow down).

But assuming that installation in your link just happens to have a simple fix and that others are not as forgiving, how is committing node_modules supposed to help here if you're saying you can't even get it to a working state in the first place? DO you own the repo in order to be able to make the change? Or are you mostly just saying that hindsight is 20-20?

[0] https://github.com/jshint/jshint/blob/master/package.json#L4...

[1] https://github.com/node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi/issues/143

NodeJS also has an FFI, where you can build a shared library (not limited to c++) and import it. Node-ffi-addon