Node must not rely on functionality exposed through `--allow-natives-syntax`

[hashseed]

As I found out here, Node enables --allow-natives-syntax in V8 during bootstrapping and disables later.

This is so v8.previewMapIterator and v8.previewSetIterator in lib/internal/v8.js can be compiled during bootstrapping, as the call %MapIteratorClone and %SetIteratorClone. There are two major flaws in this:

• This relies on v8/src/runtime/runtime.h defining %MapIteratorClone. Note that this is an implementation detail deep inside of V8 and could change at any time without any warning. In this particular case, %MapIteratorClone is only used inside V8 for the outdated debug context implementation that we were planning to remove for a long time.
• This also relies on the fact that once compiled, the function does not need to be compiled again. That could change in the future if V8 implements code aging for bytecode.

Well I guess now that V8 tests against Node, V8 developers are forced to not violate these wrong assumptions.

Please please remove these dependencies.

[addaleax]

I think we can be very empathetic to this, because it’s a problem that we’ve been running into far too many times ourselves :)

Do you have any suggestions for how we’d best avoid this? We only use it for inspecting these objects at the moment in console.log()/util.inspect(). I guess we could use the inspector bindings, but maybe there’s a better way to achieve that goal?

Also, one more note: We do use --allow_natives_syntax in test/parallel/test-http-same-map for %HaveSameMap. I assume the same holds there as well?

[bnoordhuis]

This one's on me, I'm afraid... the use of natives was only a stop-gap measure. It's on my todo list to file CLs to add a proper C++ API for inspecting map and set iterators, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.