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I'm attempting to make a function that would allow for triggering a script in a V8 instance of Node from a node-chakracore instance. I'm doing this by running a newer version of Node as a child process. I want to do this in a way that it only has 1 newer Node instance instead of creating another one for every script I want to run. I want to have a runV8Script function that would trigger the script on the V8 side. The way that I'm wanting to trigger scripts is by having an IPC socket, the server side being Chakra and the client side being V8.

The issue that I'm having is that I can't think of how I could use client outside of the server callback which means I can't have a function send data.

I'm just creating this server with the simple code below, nothing fancy

let server = net.createServer(client => {
    // The client can only be used inside of this callback
});
SacriPudding
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  • Your first challenge is there there is a different `client` for every incoming connection so it's not clear what having a `send` method is supposed to do. Send to all clients? If so, then add each new `client` to a higher scoped Set or Map object that you iterate at any time. And, hook the `end` event to remove it from the Set or Map. – jfriend00 Mar 28 '21 at 03:44
  • @jfriend00 Wouldn't this just result in dropped data if the client isn't ready yet? Plus in this instance only one client *should* exist on the server because its just the communication between the singular V8 side and the singular Chakra side. – SacriPudding Mar 28 '21 at 03:51
  • I guess I don't understand your problem then. You asked how you could use `client` to send data from outside the callback. That's what I advised on. If there's more to the problem, then please define that. I didn't understand anything in your first paragraph. – jfriend00 Mar 28 '21 at 03:54

1 Answers1

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I'm attempting to make a function that would allow for triggering a script in a V8 instance of Node from a node-chakracore instance. [...] The way that I'm wanting to trigger scripts is by having an IPC socket, the server side being Chakra and the client side being V8.

The general rule of thumb is: clients trigger events in servers, not the other way round.

Luckily for you, this is perfectly possible, since Node is a server, and it can send requests to other servers. So you can have the Node-Chakracore instance running in a server role with respect to the actual requests you want to serve, and at the same time act in a client role towards the Node-V8 instance (which is running on a different port) by sending requests there.

You can either start the Node-V8 instance separately by hand, or you can have it be started as a child process by the Node-Chakracore instance (on startup). Either way, the two instances would talk to each other via a socket (HTTP or other, your choice).

A bit more detail, in case it isn't obvious: For the Chakra instance, you'd write a handler that sends a request to the V8 instance, and that second request gets a completion handler that optionally processes its result and hands it off to the first request's completion handler. (So this is all very similar conceptually to processing a database request or similar; the "database" just so happens to be another Node instance.)

jmrk
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