Command Line Arguments with Node.js and Dart2js

How on earth did it come to this?

I need for my compiled Dart to respond to command line arguments when compiled to JavaScript and run under Node.js. I think that sentence reads as proper English.

It all seemed so simple at first. I want to benchmark code for Design Patterns in Dart. I may use benchmarks for every pattern, I may use them for none—either way I would like the ability to quickly get benchmarks so that I can compare different approaches that I might take to patterns. So I would like to benchmark.

So I benchmark my Dart code. I added features to command-line Dart scripts so that they can read command line switches to vary the loop size (which seems to make a difference). Then I try to compile this code to JavaScript to be run under node.js. That actually works. Except for command line options to vary the loop size.

And so here I am. I need to figure out how to get node.js running dart2js code to accept command-line (or environment) options.

Last night I found that the usual main() entry point simply does not see command line arguments when compiled via dart2js and run with node. The print() of the command line args is an empty List even when options are supplied:

main (List<String> args) {
  print(args);
  // ...
}

With the Dart VM, I see command line options:

$ dart ./tool/benchmark.dart --loop-size=666
[--loop-size=666]

And, with the very nice args package, I can even process them to useful things. But when run with node.js, I only get a blank list:

$ node ./tool/benchmark.dart.js --loop-size=666
[]

I had thought to use some of the process environment options, but they are all part of the dart:io package which is unsupported by dart2js. Even initializing a string from the environment does not work:

const String LOOP_SIZE = const String.fromEnvironment("LOOP_SIZE", defaultValue: "10");

No matter how I tried to set that environment variable, my compiled JavaScript would only use the default value.

So am I stuck?

The answer turns out to be embedded in the output of dart2js code. At the very top of the file are a couple of hints including:

// dartMainRunner(main, args):
//    if this function is defined, the Dart [main] method will not be invoked
//    directly. Instead, a closure that will invoke [main], and its arguments
//    [args] is passed to [dartMainRunner].

It turns out that I can use this dartMainRunner() function to grab command line arguments the node.js way so that they can be supplied to the compiled Dart. In fact, I need almost no code to do it:

function dartMainRunner(main, args) {
  main(process.argv.slice(2)); 
}

I slice off the first two command line arguments, supplying the main() callback with the rest. In the case of my node.js code, the first two arguments are the node executable and the script name:

$ node ./tool/benchmark.dart.js --loop-size=666

With those chomped off, I am only supplying the remainder of the command line arguments—the switches that control how my benchmarks will run.

This is a bit of a hassle in my Dart benchmarks since I will need to add that wrapper code to each implementation every time that I make a change. I probably ought to put all of this into a Makefile (or equivalent). For now, however, I simply make it part of my benchmarking shell script:

#...
# Compile
wrapper='function dartMainRunner(main, args) { main(process.argv.slice(2)); }';
dart2js -o tool/benchmark.dart.js \
           tool/benchmark.dart
echo $wrapper >> tool/benchmark.dart.js

# More compiling then actual benchmarks ...

And that works!

Thanks to my already in place gnuplot graphing solution, I can even plot my three implementations of the Visitor Pattern compiled from Dart into JavaScript. The number of microseconds it takes a single run relative to the number of loops winds up looking like this:



That is a little different than last night's Dart numbers, but the bottom line seems to be that it does not matter too much which implementation I choose. At least for this pattern. Regardless, I am grateful to be able to get these numbers quickly now—even from node.js.


Day #127

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