When attempting to import Connection from @solana/web3.js, this appears when it is run:
bigint: Failed to load bindings, pure JS will be used (try npm run rebuild?)
It appears to still run, but I am concerned about what it may impact. Has anyone come across a solution to this?
None of the answers above go to the root cause of the issue and won't solve it, depending on how you are building the environment and running the application.
In my case, the error was occurring in an acceptance tests setup using a very simple docker image starting from node:21.4.0-bookworm-slim. Notice the *-slim part, which means an image with the absolute minimal preinstalled packages.
FROM node:21.4.0-bookworm-slim
WORKDIR /code
COPY package* tsconfig.json /code
RUN npm install
Of course, running the tests, which happens to use bigint-buffer, was displaying the warning. Although nothing was failing, it was a performance concern (maybe...). In any case, I can't sleep with these warnings polluting my terminal.
$ docker compose exec client npm run test:acceptance
> [email protected] test:acceptance
> rm -rf ./dist/* && tsc && node --test dist/*.test.js
bigint: Failed to load bindings, pure JS will be used (try npm run rebuild?)
✔ reads own balance (53.348432ms)
▶ creates/deletes PDA
✔ fails for non-admin user (12.346694ms)
✔ fails for insuficient lamports (7.776273ms)
...
Running npm run rebuild as suggested inside the container didn't help. Digging deeper, it turns out that bigint-buffer uses native C bindings for performance reasons, but as such it requires certain dependencies to exist on the host to compile the file written in C. In case these dependencies are not there, it will fallback gracefully to JS implementation, which will still work, but will be less performant.
The build is performed by a tool called node-gyp. This is not very clear from the bigint-buffer perspective, but in node-gyp the dependencies are clearly described in their README:
PythonmakeGCCIn my Debian setup, all I needed was to install python3 and build-essential (which contains make and gcc), adding the following to the Dockerfile before running npm install (so the OS dependencies are there when bigint-buffer is installed by npm):
RUN apt update \
&& apt install --assume-yes --no-install-recommends \
build-essential \
python3
If you are running this locally, of course you can just install the equivalent dependencies directly on your computer. Of course if you are using another distro, MacOS or Windows you'll need different dependencies, but the spirit is same.
And done! Optimized native big numbers are now used and no warning is displayed anymore!
I was having the same issue and npm rebuild solved the issue.
npm i -g npm-check-updates ncu -u npm install
ncu -u and did install again, I continue to experience the problem.
npm install bigint-buffer
This utility is necessary because BigInts, as proposed, do not support direct conversion between Buffers (or UInt8Arrays), but rather require conversion from buffers to hexadecimal strings then to BigInts, which is suboptimal.
Did you run npm rebuild? That seemed to fix it for me and a few other people on discord...
Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS fixed with
sudo apt -install build-essential
--> It work for me
The solution is to use nvm to install the lts version of node and npm.
You can find the node version manager here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm
nvm install --lts
nvm use --lts
the latest version of node and npm also removed the bigint warning, but it introduced a new one related to punycode. (A deprecation warning)
using the lts version will resolve that.
