Why use Buffer as an implicit dependency?

[viddo]

☝️ 👉

node-source-map-support/source-map-support.js

Line 111 in 6296f61

sourceMapData = new Buffer(rawData, "base64").toString();

Background:
We (https://github.com/CartoDB/cartodb) suffered a Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded exception on uncaught exceptions after upgrading browserify. I found some similar reported stuff here, e.g. #86 and #93, but after some investigation I found the culprit to be the implicit dependency of buffer used at the line above.

Since there's no reference to this module in this repo I presume that it's accessible through the browserify module? Considering it's a key piece for this module to work, why not define the dependency in this package?

That said, there's a fix but it's not yet released (v3.4.2), so my temporary workaround to this was to override the implicit dependency, see: https://github.com/CartoDB/cartodb/pull/5171/files The fix was released in buffer v3.4.2

cc @tanem who seem to have suffered similar issues, perhaps this also works for you

[tanem]

Thanks @viddo, I didn't realise there was a fix in the buffer module. I raised #94 around this issue too, which also details our workaround. We use webpack, which uses the same buffer implementation as browserify.