[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#904274:

[Nicolas Noble]

I need to voice my disagreement with the notion that compilation of addons
is straightforward, by the way, for a few reasons.

1) compiling code IS difficult. Planning for every single compiler, edge
case, combinations of libraries, etc is fairly nightmarish. gRPC for
instance is publishing 123 precompiled binaries only for node, and we are
limiting ourselves to a known compiler.

In fact, a good third of our issues are linked with the compilability of
our addon.

2) Not everyone WANTS a compiler to be present on their production
machines. This is often viewed as a security risk.

3) It's time consuming. Compiling the gRPC node extension at the moment
takes roughly 1 to 2 minutes, whereas the downloading of a precompiled
binary is almost instant. For deployment at scale, these are precious CPU
resources being consumed for the sake of recompilation. For development
time, these are frequent "2 minutes" being lost by developers waiting for
their npm dependencies to compile.
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