Just reporting two libs I tried to use that didn't work for me 😉 (elkjs & netlistsvg)

[akavel]

Describe the bug
I wanted to try if I could use boa in my statically generated blog, to render circuit diagrams using two open-source JS libs (netlistsvg + elkjs), which IIUC seem quite self-contained when taken as a pair. I'm not sure how to do this with the CLI, and also at least one of them seems to throw an error.

To Reproduce

$ cargo install --version 0.20.0 boa_cli
$ curl -O https://unpkg.com/netlistsvg@1.0.2/built/netlistsvg.bundle.js
$ curl -O https://unpkg.com/elkjs@0.10.0/lib/elk.bundled.js
$ boa elk.bundled.js
undefined
$ # ok, this seemed to kinda work; can I use it as a module? is this the way?
$ boa -m elk.bundled.js
Uncaught TypeError: cannot convert 'null' or 'undefined' to object
$ # uh, this didn't seem to go well :( let's see what happens if I try netlistsvg:
$ boa netlistsvg.bundle.js
Uncaught TypeError: not a constructor
$ # oops, this didn't seem to work even without -m :(
$ # also, how can I then use those from a non-module script? should I use -m or not use -m?

Expected behavior

1. no Uncaught TypeError lines

2. some example in --help how can I run a simple script with those libraries - for example, I could imagine something like:

   $ boa --require elk=elk.bundled.js --require netlistsvg=netlistsvg.bundle.js --expression "netlistsvg.render(netlistsvg.digitalSkin, netlistsvg.exampleDigital, (err, result) => console.log(result));"
   

Build environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows
• Version: 10
• Target triple: ?
• Rustc version: rustc 1.85.0 (4d91de4e4 2025-02-17)

Additional context

netlistsvg simple call example via script tag: https://github.com/nturley/netlistsvg?tab=readme-ov-file#web-bundle

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://nturley.github.io/netlistsvg/elk.bundled.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://nturley.github.io/netlistsvg/built/netlistsvg.bundle.js"></script>
netlistsvg.render(netlistsvg.digitalSkin, netlistsvg.exampleDigital, (err, result) => console.log(result));

[akavel]

For starters, could you help me maybe is there a way how could I try to get some more details about the error if I wanted to check if I can attempt to fix it?

[nekevss]

Hi! Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately, to get more information from errors, we'd need to implement backtraces and span nodes (we have open issues for these topics, but haven't implemented them just yet), which would be really great in this use case.

I'm not exactly familiar with the above packages. At a quick glance, it looks like these may be using some runtime features, which may be where the error is coming from. Boa is an engine / interpreter, not a runtime. While we implement some runtime features, some functionality that is provided by Nodejs and browsers, may not be available when using the engine directly.

[akavel]

Thanks! So, that would be #3726 and #300 respectively, yes?

As to the libs, I would think they should not need runtime features; but I may be wrong (though I wonder what would they need them for? 🤔)