Set process.platform at build time

[absidue]

Set process.platform at build time

Pull Request Type

• Performance improvement

Description

For a while now I've been wondering what the best approach would be for detecting the OS that FreeTube is running on for OS specific functionality like keyboard shortcuts when we disable nodeIntegration. Currently we use Node.js' process.platform property. Originally I was planning to try and detect it with navigator.platform and navigator.userAgentData like shaka-player does, but then after looking at native code in a different project I remembed that compile to native languages do the OS specific stuff at build time and there is no reason why we can't do the same, we already have various other build flags.

The webpack config for the renderer and main files use the process.platform value of the machine that the build is running on and the web config uses undefined which is the same as the current behaviour as the process polyfill doesn't support the platform property. This shouldn't cause any problems as the _scripts/build.js script that calls electron-builder for the production builds already uses the OS of the machine it is running on and during development we launch electron on the same machine that webpack is running on so it won't cause issues there either. The only case it could cause problems is if someone were to run yarn run pack on one machine, copy the output to another machine running a different OS and run yarn run build-release there, but nobody should be doing that.

We can't get rid of the process polyfill just yet as the util polyfill that the web version of nedb uses, uses the process global, I am working on a modernised fork of nedb that should resolve that though (switch to ESM, remove the callback APIs and deprecated functionality, the idea is that we will only have to change the package name in the package.json file in FreeTube without needing any code changes).

All numbers are in bytes. For the platform specific after numbers, I hardcoded the process.platform to specific platforms in the webpack config and ran yarn run clean && yarn run pack.

	Windows	macOS	Linux
main.js before	118813	118813	118813
main.js after	117235 (-1578)	118394 (-419)	117204 (-1609)
renderer.js before	2604678	2604678	2604678
renderer.js after	2603626 (-1052)	2603464 (-1214)	2603545 (-1133)

Testing

yarn run dev and check that platform specific things like keyboard shortcuts still work.

Desktop

• OS: Windows
• OS Version: 10
• FreeTube version: 83d99dd

[PikachuEXE]

tested macOS keyboard shortcut in dev (Go back/forward one page