README.md

Overview

This is a hobby project to create a NodeJS native plugin to support a PriorityQueue class in NodeJS. The goal of this work is learn more about how the V8 JavaScript engine works, and therefore all code is written to directly use V8's API (instead of any wrappers such as N-API).

Building

Install the node-gyp tools with:

$ npm install -g node-gyp

Then configure the build for your platform, with:

$ make configure

To compile the source code and create a native plugin, use:

$ make build

Finally, to run the test suite, use:

$ make test

References

Here's all the documentation I could find on writing native plugins:

• Official NodeJS Documentation on C++ Addons
• Writing Native Node.js Modules
• V8 API Documentation

Things to do

Here are some ideas on what else could be added in future:

• The internal buffer within PriorityQueue doesn't expand, so we'll quickly get buffer overflows. This was less interesting to fix since it's not really V8-related.
• Adding Symbol.iterator would allow us to iterate through the data structure. However, due to the nature of heaps, we'd need to consume all the values as we read them, so the heap will be empty by the time we're done.
• The default comparison function only works for numbers.