node-datachannel Prebuilt Binaries Missing RTTI and Wrong Architecture

[akhileshthite]

We are using Electron with @libp2p/[email protected] which depends on [email protected]. We encountered two major issues:

1. Linux:
   The native module fails with an undefined RTTI symbol error:

Error: /tmp/.org.chromium.Chromium.XXXX: undefined symbol: _ZTVN10__cxxabiv117__class_type_infoE

This appears to be due to the binary being built with RTTI disabled (likely via -fno-rtti).

2. macOS (Intel):
   When running the app on an Intel Mac, we see:

mach-o file, but is an incompatible architecture (have 'arm64', need 'x86_64')

This indicates that the prebuilt binary is compiled for arm64 instead of x86_64.

Workaround

We were able to work around these issues locally by:

• Patching node-datachannel:
  We modified the build configuration (in cmake/toolchain/ci.cmake) to ensure that the C++ compiler flags include -frtti (enabling RTTI).

set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} $ENV{COMPILER_FLAGS} -frtti")

js-node-datachannel/cmake/toolchain/ci.cmake

Line 23 in 844e1dd

set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} $ENV{COMPILER_FLAGS}")

• Forcing a Rebuild from Source:
  We ran:

npm rebuild node-datachannel --build-from-source

This resulted in a freshly built node_datachannel.node with the correct RTTI support.

Why it's important?

We observed the same issues when testing with latest @ipshipyard/node-datachannel version ^0.26.4 and @libp2p/webrtc version ^5.1.0.

The current approach to work around these problems involves manually patching node-datachannel’s build configuration and explicitly rebuilding the module from source (e.g., using npm rebuild node-datachannel --build-from-source and setting npm_config_arch=x64 on Intel Macs). This process requires custom CI scripts and local workarounds, which is not ideal. Ideally, the prebuilt binaries should be compiled correctly for Electron:

RTTI Enabled: Ensuring that the module is built with RTTI support (i.e. without -fno-rtti).

PR:
p2plabsxyz/peersky-browser#18