I have no idea what it is but I think it does some sort of compiling of C modules. Either way it is a giant pain in the ass. I'm trying to play with some C addons for node and I have it installed on my centos machine which went smoothly but trying to install it on the rhel machine at work isn't working nor is installing it on ubuntu on my work machine. I've spent awhile now trying to figure out what exactly is breaking. I've had this problem before with node-gyp not doing the installation properly but ultimately it's my fault for not understanding the tool. Some day I'll need to learn what it's doing. Not today though, way too tired!
PS. This is more low effort content for now.
Well Goddamn! I created a directory called object-wrap for the object-wrap node api example and ran into the strangest errors about ambiguity. I say strange but it makes sense and I imagine if I understood it would actually make sense. Either way annoyed that I ran into a problem so dumb and of my own doing.
Addition 2022-03-20 - node-gyp configure build is actually two commands, configure and build. Configure seems to set up the make files and then I can edit them and build then runs it. I tried to get gcc4.8 to compile the node addon api project for d3 by removing the gnu++17 flag and I did by doing the two steps separately but it looks node addon api uses more advanced features. I might need to use the C version of the node addon stuff.