How can I work with N-API interface directly? How to build Deno from source-code to get the N-API bindings like libnode does for NodeJS?

[luanmm]

Hello, fellow community!

I'm currently developing a project that runs in .NET, but has some extension points that allows users to extend some functionalities using the JavaScript ecosystem.

Nowadays, this is limited to what ClearScript (a project from Microsoft) supports, which is the language itself, basically. But it even support something similar as Deno, to import libraries directly from URL and some features like this - which is very nice, in fact.

Even having this library as a helper for the extensibility scenario, I've been thinking that Deno would fit a lot better here, because of its great API and ecosystem, totally streamlined with Web concepts and so on.

I've found, then, this project: microsoft/node-api-dotnet#170. It's basically a "marshaller" to integrate NodeJS and .NET, in a way that .NET code can be called from Node and vice-versa. The thing is that I do not want to work with NodeJS because of all the things that came with Deno (regarding security, some kind of "sandboxing", TypeScript support, etc). I think Deno and node-api-dotnet would be a great solution in my scenario.

The thing is that I'm not aware on how N-API works in a deeper point of view. So I would appreciate a lot if somebody could give any tips or guidance on how I could try to start these bindings to bring Deno support to this library, in a way that I could fulfill the needs of .NET/Deno "interop".

Things that would be great as a start:

• How could I compile Deno to have a shared library that I can bind node-api-dotnet to it? Which output asset has the N-API? I thought Deno was distributed as a single executable, so should I build it differently to have a shared library like libnode (something like a libdeno)?
• After binding the library and Deno, there is a way that I could customize the file access APIs? This would be something nice to allow some dynamic scenarios in my project, because at first the user should be limited to a single script (which will run directly in the interop), but if I could map the file-system access in Deno to the storage dynamically (like a VFS), the "file-access APIs" would allow reading pottentially from any storage (even in databases or S3-like storages).

Thanks in advance for the attention.

Best regards.