Electron 'remote' module is considered harmful

[LRode]

Describe the bug
Starting in Electron version 10, the electron remote module is disabled by default. You have to manually enable it, and the Electron docs recommend moving away from using it (For many reasons see this article).

As we are using the launchdarkly-electron-client-sdk in an Electron version greater than 10, we had to enable remote module to use it. I was wondering if there are any plans to upgrade the code and move away from the remote module.

To reproduce

• Import launchdarkly-electron-client-sdk in Electron renderer process, with Electron version 10+.
  (In our case, we are using it in the renderer preload script)
• Renderer fails to load, and can see error messages that electron remote is undefined

Workaround:

• Add enableRemoteModule: true to webPreferences of BrowserWindow
• Or: implement custom IPC methods to communicate from main to renderer and don't use launchdarkly-electron-client-sdk in the renderer.

Expected behavior
Importing launchdarkly-electron-client-sdk without enableRemoteModule: true should work without errors.

Logs

SDK version
1.6.3

Language version, developer tools
Electron: 13.6.3, Typescript: 4.6.0

OS/platform
macOS 11.6

[eli-darkly]

We do plan to revisit the Electron SDK code and update it for more modern Electron versions. We don't have a time frame for that yet— it has been a low priority because we haven't had much demand for Electron— but we expect that our next release will be a major version release that will revise the architecture to address issues like this, and will also drop support for EOL versions of Electron (which currently would mean all versions below 14).

[psoares]

We're using electron 18.2.4. The client works fine on the main process, but fails on the renderer on this call:

function getMainEntryPoints() {
  // See mainEntryPointsFromRenderer.js
  return electron.remote.require('launchdarkly-electron-client-sdk/src/mainEntryPointsFromRenderer');
}

It seems like electron 18 doesn't expose a remote method anymore, even if I specify enableRemoteModule: true on my BrowserWindow's webPreferences,

See https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/breaking-changes#planned-breaking-api-changes-140

[Galkon]

This SDK is years outdated and using bad electron practices. To use LD in the renderer you end up needing to propagate state/events from main process, or use LD browser SDK separately (which is out of sync with main process from this SDK). Crazy that LaunchDarkly has not patched this to support modern electron versions, especially considering it was over 20 major electron versions ago this change was made.