Description
The recently announced Node 8 has a new experimental feature called N-API which is aimed at reducing maintenance cost for node native addons. Checkout this blog for more details on its benefits.
node-canvas is one of the top native addons by download dependency count, and in order to help the Node.js community make the important transition to N-API, we are hoping you will be able to work with us in order to migrate node-canvas to N-API. Your support and feedback is important in making this effort a success.
We (N-API team) have built a preliminary port of node-canvas on top of N-API as part of our effort to understand the API surface used by native modules. We used this port and the port of some other modules to determine which areas to focus on converting to N-API. This port has all of the NAN and V8-specific code removed and replaced by N-API equivalents. While it passes all the canvas unit tests and visual tests, it might not meet the quality and performance level to go in as-is. It would certainly be a springboard if someone on node-canvas was serious about doing the conversion to N-API. Please take a look if you're interested. I will be happy to answer questions about the port, point to documentation/code, etc.
If you'd like, you may join our WG meeting which happens every Thursday at 1:30 Eastern / 10:30 Pacific US time, to discuss any issues.
We'd assume you don't want to immediately take a dependency on a feature that still has "experimental" status. The best case scenario from our point of view might be if the node-canvas team could eventually maintain a branch that uses N-API, that is kept mostly up to date with development occurring in node-canvas/master. But I understand you might not be ready for that just yet. Of course we'd appreciate feedback about anything we can do to improve the development or migration experience.