Currently the variables field of the generated config.gypi file inherits from process.config:

And the target_defaults field does inherit from process.config for the reason that the build configurations of the running node executable may be different from the target being compiled for:

However the variables field also belongs to build configurations of Node.js, and should be treated the same with target_defaults, for example Node.js executable compiled with v8_enable_pointer_compression=1 can not load modules compiled with v8_enable_pointer_compression=0.

This has been causing problems when compiling modules for Electron, because node-gyp is using process.config.variables of the running node executable for compilation, which are different from the build configurations of Electron.

So the generated config.gypi file should not inherit from process.config at all, and it should inherit from the $nodedir/include/node/config.gypi file instead, which is the actual build configuration of the target.

I can start working out a pull request if the above suggested solution sounds good to the maintainers.

/cc @rvagg