Does not work in Electron on Windows

Despite my best efforts, I cannot get this to work in Electron. The program always fails and shows an error window indicating a C/C++ error, not even a JS error:

My steps:

1. Create an empty Node.js project.
2. Install electron, tdl, and electron-rebuild.
3. Run npx electron-rebuild to retarget the native bindings to Electron.
4. Download the precompiled Telegram binaries and put them in a lib folder.
5. Create index.js with the following code:

const { Client: TGClient } = require("tdl");

(async () => {
    console.log("initialising tg client");

    try {
        const tgClient = new TGClient({
            apiId: 000000,
            apiHash: "oops",
            binaryPath: "lib/tdjson",
            useTestDc: true,
            useMutableRename: true,
            verbosityLevel: 10
        });

        console.log("initialised tg client");

        await tgClient.connect();

        console.log("connected tg client");

        tgClient.on("update", (...args) => console.log("tg client: ", ...args));
        tgClient.on("error", (...args) => console.error("tg client: ", ...args));

    } catch (e) {
        console.error(e);
    }
})();

1. Run npx electron . to launch the program.
2. Program prints “initialised tg client”, indicating that tdl successfully loads, but then crashes as soon as I call connect().
3. Get confronted with this inscrutable error window.

[laptou]

Opened https://github.com/node-ffi-napi/node-ffi-napi/issues/20.

[Bannerets]

Confirm that it fails on Windows.

---

It seems that it works with ffi instead of ffi-napi. Try this:

npm i https://github.com/node-ffi/node-ffi.git#169773db0d56c4c99225b307b3dc86a46f3af34d
npm i ref
npx electron-rebuild

then replace require('ffi-napi') with require('ffi') and require('ref-napi') with require('ref') in node_modules/tdl/dist/tdlib-ffi.js file.

---

After some debugging I found that it crashes due to async ffi calls. Minimal reproducible example:

const ffi = require('ffi-napi')
//const ref = require('ref-napi')
console.log(0)
const kernel32 = ffi.Library('kernel32', {
  Sleep: ['void', ['int32']]
})
console.log(1)
kernel32.Sleep.async(1000, err => console.log('err', err))

( kernel32 here is just for example, you can use any function. Example from tdl: )

const ffi = require('ffi-napi')
const tdjson = ffi.Library('tdjson', {
  'td_json_client_create': ['pointer', []]
})
tdjson.td_json_client_create.async((err, cl) => {
  if (err) console.log('Error', err)
  else console.log('Client created', cl)
})

I think we should open an issue somewhere in nodejs / electron / node-ffi-napi repo.

---

Versions:

• Windows 10
• electron: v3.0.6 (uses node v10.2.0)
• electron-rebuild: v1.8.2
• ffi-napi: v2.4.3
• ref-napi: v1.4.0