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Native API imports survey data

This directory contains data about imported native APIs for the most depended-upon NPM packages with native modules, along with the script used to generate/update the API data. The intention is to use this data to track and prioritize NAPI coverage of the most-used native APIs.

TopPackagesWithNativeModules.csv

This data is somewhat collected using the npm-pkg-top tool, but manually edited to remove false positives. npm-pkg-top does not do a perfect job of listing only packages with native modules: when querying with type 'binary' (the default) it actually includes any packages that have a preinstall, install, or postinstall script. (It uses the skimdb needBuild view, which filters packages on the existence of those scripts.) While node_gyp is probably the most common reason for a package to have an install script, there are many packages that have other kinds of install scripts.

TopNativeImports.csv

This data is collected using the list-native-imports.js script in this directory.

The current data includes 31 of the top packages having native modules, by number of dependencies. Not included are several top packages that failed to install: fsevents, pty.js, newrelic, mdns, java, i2c, windows.foundation, usb, time, v8-profiler, i2c-bus, mapnik, oracledb, grpc

ColumnDescription
Pkg count The number of packages that imported this native API. (A count of the package names in the next column.)
Package names List of packages (NPM package IDs) that imported this native API.
Imported name Simple name of the native API, including namespace if applicable.

This column may contain duplicates when there are multiple APIs (overloads) with the same name.

Imported signature Full C++ signature of the native API, for C++ imports. For C imports (such as libuv APIs), this is just the same as the previous column because C APIs are exported and imported as simple names.

Note only 64-bit modules are counted. When a signature includes `__ptr64`, assume that the equivalent 32-bit API is imported by a 32-bit build of the same module.

Sorting & filtering

By default the data is sorted by the Pkg count column, based on the assumption that APIs imported by the most packages are the highest priority.

To filter the view to see only native APIs imported by a single package, use the following steps:

  1. Open the CSV file in Excel.
  2. Select the first (header) row and turn on filtering for the headers: Ctrl+Shift+L, or the Filter button on the Data ribbon.
  3. Click the drop-down arrow for the Package names column and enter the desired package name in the filter search box.

Data collection procedure

Prerequisite: Windows with Visual Studio 2015 (including C++ tools). Currently the list-native-imports.js script is Windows-only because it makes use of a couple VC tools for inspecting binaries: dumpbin.exe and undname.exe.

  1. Create a new empty Node.js project with npm init.
  2. Install all targeted packages containing native modules. Yes, unfortunately this process requires installing and compiling all the native modules, because there's no other good way to determine precisely what native APIs are imported by the native modules. 
    npm install node-sass sqlite3 bcrypt ...
  3. Run the list-native-imports.js script. This writes CSV data to stdout; redirect to a .CSV file to save it.