Distribution decisionsΒΆ

There are a couple of ways I could have distributed the library:

  1. Distribute a libv8cffi.so or libv8.so as a separate package, install it into LD_LIBRARY_PATH and copy natives_blob.bin + snapshot_blob.bin into somewhere.
  2. Compile everything from source at install time.

The second option is probably the worst since the V8 repo alone is about 800MB and it takes quite a few minutes to fetch and compile. The first option is ok I guess, but I’d rather prefer the user compiles the library them-self.

So, I went with some intermediate option: distribute the V8 static libraries (.a) when possible and compile the cffi wrapper at install time.