This change implements free variable calculations and wires it up
to closure serialization. This is recursive, in the sense that
the serializer may need to call back to fetch free variables for
nested functions encountered during serialization.
The free variable calculation works by parsing the serialized
function text and walking the AST, applying the usual scoping rules
to determine what is free. In particular, it respects nested
function boundaries, and rules around var, let, and const scoping.
We are using Acorn to perform the parsing. I'd originally gone
down the path of using V8, so that we have one consistent parser
in the game, however unfortunately neither V8's parser nor its AST
is a stable API meant for 3rd parties. Unlike the exising internal
V8 dependencies, this one got very deep very quickly, and I became
nervous about maintaining all those dependencies. Furthermore,
by doing it this way, we can write the free variable logic in
JavaScript, which means one fewer C++ component to maintain.
This also includes a fairly significant amount of testing, all
of which passes! 🎉
This change contains an initial implementation of closure serialization
built atop V8, rather than our own custom runtime. This requires that
we use a Node.js dynamic C++ module, so that we can access the V8
APIs directly. No build magic is required beyond node-gyp.
For the most part, this was straight forward, except for one part: we
have to use internal V8 APIs. This is required for two reasons:
1) We need access to the function's lexical closure environment, so
that we may look up closure variables. Although there is a
tantalizingly-close v8::Object::CreationContext, its implementation
intentionally pokes through closure contexts in order to recover
the Function constructor context instead. That's not what we
want. We want the raw, unadulterated Function::context.
2) We need to control the lexical lookups of free variables so that
they can look past chained contexts, lexical contexts, withs, and
eval-style context extensions. Simply runing a v8::Script, or
simulating an eval, doesn't do the trick. Hence, we need to access
the unexported v8::internal::Context::Lookup function.
There is a third reason which is not yet implemented: free variable
calculation. I could use Esprima, or do my own scanner for free
variables, but I'd prefer to simply use the V8 parser so that we're
using the same JavaScript parser across all components. That too
is not part of the v8.h API, so we'll need to crack it open more.
To be clear, these are still exported public APIs, in proper headers
that are distributed with both Node and V8. They simply aren't part
of the "stable" v8.h surface area. As a result, I do expect that
maintaining this will be tricky, and I'd like to keep exploring how
to do this without needing the internal dependency. For instance,
although this works with node-gyp just fine, we will probably be
brittle across versions of Node/V8, when the internal APIs might be
changing. This will introduce unfortunate versioning headaches (all,
hopefully and thankfully, caught at compile-time).
