How to reuse node.js's linked icu4c library (data) in your native addon

[MichaelBelousov]

I have a native addon that needs to use some icu4c stable APIs.

• Is it possible to reuse node's ICU in some way?
• Is it guaranteed that node will always link icu4c?
• Is there a guaranteed ABI-safe way in my native addon to get the icu common data from node.js, so that I don't need to statically link a duplicate of that huge data into my own native addon?

[MichaelBelousov]

doing nm -C $(which node), I see icu4c's function renaming is enabled, which means symbol names are not stable across versions. So they cannot be successfully used by including a header file in my addon's build. Is there still a stable way to get the common icu data? Would the node.js project be interested in adding an official ABI stable way to do so?

[MichaelBelousov]

I can't tell from there, did you follow these recommendations and disable function renaming?
https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/icu4c/build.html#icu-as-a-system-level-library

I could take a crack at it

[bnoordhuis]

It's been almost six years, I don't remember.

[MichaelBelousov]

I definitely wouldn't remember 😄, hopefully I'll get around to this, we can close this as answered "no" if you'd like, and I can open a separate issue to track it.

[bnoordhuis]

Sounds good. One potential pitfall: node gets embedded by projects such as electron, which ships its own copy of ICU. Turning off symbol renaming might result in duplicate symbol conflicts.

[MichaelBelousov]

Good point. Sounds possible. I'll go see if electron is aware of this. Thanks.