By default in node the process variable will be defined so it's irrelevant
to check this. In browser-like environments like cloudflare and modern bundlers
like the ones you can find in src/fixtures it's important to go for safety and
give folks the option to strip this out of their bundle. In the README
of every one of these fixtures you can find the conclusion
To me the above conclusions and the given that it works in Node.JS hints to me that
using either typeof process !== 'undefined' && process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'
is the safest. We can add additional safety for browsers by adding the process.env
check in the middle to prevent id="process" from throwing a spanner, however
the replace plugins could also take care of that.
There is one more thing to be said here and that's that most of the above experiments
will fail towards the development branch if they do not use a way to replace this. In
ESBuild and wrangler there is no way to replace a typeof check meaning that they
will always use the development check unless they use something to pre-bundle like
rollup which can leverage expression replacement.
A safe-by-default fix for this could be to switch from guarding production to guarding
development which would make production the default and give everyone a much faster
experience when using graphql.js.