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node-addon-api module

This module contains header-only C++ wrapper classes which simplify the use of the C based N-API provided by Node.js when using C++. It provides a C++ object model and exception handling semantics with low overhead.

N-API is an ABI stable C interface provided by Node.js for building native addons. It is independent from the underlying JavaScript runtime (e.g. V8 or ChakraCore) and is maintained as part of Node.js itself. It is intended to insulate native addons from changes in the underlying JavaScript engine and allow modules compiled for one version to run on later versions of Node.js without recompilation.

The node-addon-api module, which is not part of Node.js, preserves the benefits of the N-API as it consists only of inline code that depends only on the stable API provided by N-API. As such, modules built against one version of Node.js using node-addon-api should run without having to be rebuilt with newer versions of Node.js.

It is important to remember that other Node.js interfaces such as libuv (included in a project via #include <uv.h>) are not ABI-stable across Node.js major versions. Thus, an addon must use N-API and/or node-addon-api exclusively and build against a version of Node.js that includes an implementation of N-API (meaning a version of Node.js newer than 6.14.2) in order to benefit from ABI stability across Node.js major versions. Node.js provides an ABI stability guide containing a detailed explanation of ABI stability in general, and the N-API ABI stability guarantee in particular.

As new APIs are added to N-API, node-addon-api must be updated to provide wrappers for those new APIs. For this reason node-addon-api provides methods that allow callers to obtain the underlying N-API handles so direct calls to N-API and the use of the objects/methods provided by node-addon-api can be used together. For example, in order to be able to use an API for which the node-addon-api does not yet provide a wrapper.

APIs exposed by node-addon-api are generally used to create and manipulate JavaScript values. Concepts and operations generally map to ideas specified in the ECMA262 Language Specification.

Current version: 1.6.2

(See CHANGELOG.md for complete Changelog)

NPM NPM

Setup

API Documentation

The following is the documentation for node-addon-api.

Examples

Are you new to node-addon-api? Take a look at our examples

Tests

To run the node-addon-api tests do:

npm install
npm test

To avoid testing the deprecated portions of the API run

npm install
npm test --disable-deprecated

Take a look and get inspired by our test suite

More resource and info about native Addons

WG Members / Collaborators

Name GitHub link
Anna Henningsen addaleax
Arunesh Chandra aruneshchandra
Benjamin Byholm kkoopa
Gabriel Schulhof gabrielschulhof
Hitesh Kanwathirtha digitalinfinity
Jason Ginchereau jasongin
Michael Dawson mhdawson
Nicola Del Gobbo NickNaso
Sampson Gao sampsongao
Taylor Woll boingoing

Licensed under MIT

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Module for using N-API from C++

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  • C++ 75.9%
  • JavaScript 17.5%
  • C 6.0%
  • Python 0.6%