@bmacnaughton requesting membership/observer

[bmacnaughton]

I develop Solarwinds APM agent for node and am directly impacted by changes to module loading.

Packages like stealthy-require and esm present problems. My primary interest is in making sure there is a viable way to patch required modules in order to instrument them.

[GeoffreyBooth]

+1. Out of curiosity, what problems do those modules present?

[bmacnaughton]

stealthy-require unloads already loaded modules. Our instrumentation module sends an init message on load via nexttick as well as modifying the require module so newly loaded modules (that we instrument) get patched for instrumentation. stealthy-require's unloading the cache results in two init messages and the patching referring to an instance of our module that is no longer loaded. (There is a workaround in place for this but it took a bit to isolate the issue.)

esm, if loaded first, breaks us. With node 10.11.0, esm, in combination with us, causes a core dump. The command line:

node -r appoptics-apm -r esm index.js where index.js is an empty file results in a core dump.

I haven't dug deeply into it because the customer is fine with running node 8 but I'll have to at some point.

[devsnek]

observer sounds good to me.

@bmacnaughton btw esm (@jdalton i'll give you a million dollars to rename it) isn't ours and we don't provide support for it, you should direct that to https://github.com/standard-things/esm

[bmacnaughton]

@devsnek - I know it's not yours and I wish it didn't exist. I'll ask them for support at some point when I have time to isolate the issue or when the customer can't use node 8.

[MylesBorins]

Approved with quorum in the meeting