Native node modules from extensions

I’m looking to build an extension but one of the packages I need to depend on is a native module. When I do an npm install it installs the package just fine, I can launch a node shell and interact with it, etc. But when I go to use the package from within my plugin I get an error as it’s trying to load the ia32 build of the native module not the x64 which was compiled by node-gyp.

A quick bit of debugging indicates that the problem stems by process.arch returning ia32 when running in VS Code when my machine is a x64 machine (Win10 x64).

So is there some way to either:

• Have VS Code run an x64 process
• Have VS Code’s ia32 process do my npm restore (and subsequent compile with node-gyp)

Otherwise I fear that my extension might be dead in the water 😦

[firien]

The Extension Publishing section of Roadmap 2019 includes:

🏃 Enable extensions to install additional platform specific components at extension installation time.

would this address this issue?

[octref]

While I can’t promise adding any support to make it easier to use native modules, we can add some documentations for the current state: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-docs/issues/2211