Unable to process the null exceptions of the Node.js 14.x REPL

[mmomtchev]

FATAL ERROR: Error::Error napi_define_properties
 1: 0xa3ac30 node::Abort() [node]
 2: 0x970199 node::FatalError(char const*, char const*) [node]
 3: 0x9701a2  [node]
 4: 0xa07f1b napi_fatal_error [node]

This part of the code

node-addon-api/napi-inl.h

Line 2613 in e9db2ad

if (status != napi_ok) {

can cause a crash in Node.js 14.x in REPL - I was not able to reproduce in a later version and maybe it does not happen.

The type-ahead displaying in REPL has some very special peculiarities and constructors can fail - I suppose because it uses an eval context without globals - which it can detect, catch and ignore. In particular, a constructor can throw a null value. In this case, node-addon-api will be unable to create an Error object - it will fail with the above error.

I won't bother with a minimal reproduction, since it probably won't be fixed anyway, but if you want to see it:

nvm use 14.x
git clone https://github.com/mmomtchev/pymport
npm install
node-pre-gyp configure --debug
node-pre-gyp build
node
> const { PyObject } = require('.');
const a = PyObject.fromJS(4);
> a.co     // Start typing a.constr and it will crash, if you copy&paste a.constr everything will be ok

The crash happens when calling FunctionReference::New() - napi_new_instance throws null and the wrapping of the error object in the code cited above fails.

If you short-circuit the error object wrapping, the Node.js REPL correctly catches the null exception and continues without error.

Bypassing node-addon-api and manually re-implementing FunctionReference::New() also fixes the issue.

[JckXia]

I believe this was related to #1000 that was specific to Node.js 14 (fixed in 16 and later).

I am not too certain of the mechanism behind this but it was an issue with V8 IIRC. We attempted to backport that fix into the Node14 line but there was quite a bit of change required so we've abandoned the fix.

[mmomtchev]

Closing as a duplicate