Add narrative documentation on how we do binary deployment

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp, nodejs

Research direction

Start with glossary.md and the existing node-pre-gyp wiki pages for External-libraries and FAQ. Trace the documented flow from C++ source through node addons to binary distribution, covering mason and node-pre-gyp, then integrate the relevant old documentation into this repository with links to the glossary and related material.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Now that our https://github.com/mapbox/cpp/blob/master/glossary.md is fairly complete, it is a good time to add new, narrative docs that tie together glossary terms.

In particular, there is a need for a binary deployment doc that explains the flow from C++ source code -> node addons -> binary distribution.

Here is a first stab at listing things to cover in this doc:

We use mason for:

  • distributing pre-compiled (aka binary) static libraries for C/C++ code. And in rare cases shared libraries.
  • distributing source code of header-only libraries
  • distributing binaries of executables (aka command line programs).

We use node-pre-gyp for:

  • Binary deployment of node C++ addons
  • When those node C++ addons have external C/C++ dependencies we use mason to pull packages for them
  • Soon we'll open source https://github.com/mapbox/mason-js which will make these more seamless (no need for the mason bash scripts)

TODO:

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