Use FFI to avoid erroneous native code

[SnirBroshi]

The node-ffi module provides a managed wrapper around native DLLs.
All you need to do is to define types of functions, and then you don't have to deal with errors in calculating string sizes for malloc and what not.
All of that is taken care for you by node-ffi, a more battle-tested library.

There is also the non-maintained but already existing registry module windows-registry that does exactly this.

[pipobscure]

I have to admit I'm very astonished by this issue.

1. node-ffi is entirely pointless when you are actually providing a N-API based native module and actually adds nothing of value to that scenario. This is as close to a modern simple implementation as one can likely get.

2. The windows-registry module you reference (if you look a bit closer) works by executing regedit under the hood and parsing standard output. So is a very different beast and actually anything but battle tested.

So if anything this module deserves a bit more love and care. It deserves to be expanded to give slightly better non-string support, support for listing/browsing the registry, and support for setting values.
It also deserves to be published to NPM with the compiled binaries. This is possible since it only supports windows to begin with and N-API enables reuse of the same binary across node-versions.

[SnirBroshi]

1. node-ffi is entirely pointless when you are actually providing a N-API based native module and actually adds nothing of value to that scenario.

I think that this code is error-prone and dangerous security-wise, and (I think) node-ffi takes care of such things, and I trust it to have less errors, though you may disagree.

2. The windows-registry module you reference (if you look a bit closer) works by executing regedit under the hood and parsing standard output.

Can you point me to where they do it? AFAICT they use WinAPI directly, using node-ffi like I mentioned, I tried looking for what you mentioned and found no such thing.

So is a very different beast and actually anything but battle tested. I also said it's unmaintained.

I did not say this module was battle tested, I said that node-ffi is.