For reviewers: the bulk of the core changes are in the commit sea: add --build-sea to generate SEA directly with Node.js binary; The dependency updating tools and license updates are in deps: add tools and scripts to pull LIEF as a dependency. The rest are mostly refactoring and pulling LIEF using the script added in the previous commit.

Instead of relying on a WASM build of postject to perform the injection, add LIEF as dependency and generate the SEA directly from core via a new CLI option --build-sea which takes the SEA config. Thi simplifies SEA generation for users and makes it easier to debug/maintain the SEA building process.

For the time being, backward compatibility with the postject-based SEA building process will be maintained, until there's motivation to break it (e.g. for optimizations)

The new process is simplified to as follows - no more knowledge about the blob location in the binary needed:

$ echo 'console.log("Hello")' > hello.js
$ echo '{ "main": "hello.js", "output": "sea" }' > sea-config.json
$ node --build-sea sea-config.json
$ ./sea
Hello

This idea was discussed a while back (brought up by @marco-ippolito) at the collaboration summit to improve the UX of SEA building process, which currently requires users to use an external tool (i.e. postject) to perform the injection, and know about the layout of the target binary. For most users, the details are probably not very useful. Moving the injection process into core simplifies the process.

Bringing it into core may also make it easier to implement some of the ideas brought up back in 2022 that would require close coordination with core to implement (e.g. trimming ICU data post-build to reduce binary size).

I've been helping out with the SEA feature from time to time and as I see it, apart from UX improvement, I found the current WASM-based tool somewhat difficult to debug when I was trying to fix nodejs/postject#105. Also, the WASM build is significantly slower than a native build, which adds friction to the debugging process.

$ time out/Release/node test/sea/test-single-executable-application.js
Copied /Users/joyee/projects/node/out/Release/node to /Users/joyee/projects/node/test/.tmp.0/sea
Injected /Users/joyee/projects/node/test/.tmp.0/sea-prep.blob into /Users/joyee/projects/node/test/.tmp.0/sea
Signed /Users/joyee/projects/node/test/.tmp.0/sea

User time: 5.12s
System time: 0.38s
CPU time: 90%
Total time: 6.06s

$ time out/Release/node test/sea/test-build-sea.js
Signed /Users/joyee/projects/node/test/.tmp.0/sea

User time: 1.79s
System time: 0.34s
CPU time: 74%
Total time: 2.85s

At the summit @RaisinTen mentioned one concern about the potential binary size increase. With this POC the binary size is only increased by 5-6 MB on macOS/Linux, and ~3MB on Windows, which seems acceptable (as a reference, this is smaller than the decrease we recently got from compiling V8 with default hidden visibility #56290 (comment))

# Linux
$ ls -lah ./node_without_lief ./out/Release/node
-rwxr-xr-x 1 developer developer 122M Dec 24 16:50 ./node_without_lief
-rwxr-xr-x 1 developer developer 128M Dec 24 16:51 ./out/Release/node

# macOS
$ ls -lah ./node_without_lief ./out/Release/node
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 joyee  staff   125M Dec 24 17:48 ./node_without_lief
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 joyee  staff   130M Dec 24 17:48 ./out/Release/node

# Windows
$ ls -lah out\Release\node.exe .\node_main.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 joyee 197121 87M Jan  1 19:29 '.\node_main.exe'
-rwxr-xr-x 1 joyee 197121 90M Jan  1 19:42 'out\Release\node.exe'

In addition, I think the LIEF library may also be useful for other purposes e.g. demangling the names in the V8 prof profiles, which is a current bottleneck when trying to analyze logs via --prof-process by calling out to nm and c++filt.

Commits

test: use fixture directories for sea tests

Instead of copying and writing files on the fly for SEA tests,
put the fixtures into a directory and copy them into tmpdir
for testing. This allows easier reproduction and debugging
when they do fail - we can just copy the entire fixture directory
and test directly from there.

deps: add tools and scripts to pull LIEF as a dependency

deps: add LIEF as a dependency

sea: split sea binary manipulation code

Split the sea binary manipulation code to a seperate file so that
adding more low-level binary manipulation code doesn't clobber the
higher-level code.

sea: add --build-sea to generate SEA directly with Node.js binary

Instead of relying on a WASM build of postject to perform the
injection, add LIEF as dependency and generate the SEA directly
from core via a new CLI option --build-sea which takes the SEA
config. This simplifies SEA generation for users and makes it
easier to debug/maintain the SEA building process.

test: migrate to --build-sea in existing SEA tests

Only leave a smoking test for the postject-based workflow
in test-single-executable-application.js