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Deno is coming

Omar E. Lopez on May 10, 2020

The creator of Node.js from some time has been working in a new project called Deno, the first stable version of this project should be published i...

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Ben Halpern • May 10 '20

I'm pretty excited by the premise

Michael de Silva • May 11 '20 • Edited

It sounds like deno is going to be npm incompatible (just by its name!); not sure if yarn would support it. So my larger question, what would be the options for deno in terms of:

Managing package dependencies
Managing the version of deno installed (on your dev system)
deno & webpack, how would this work?

I also hope folks picked up on the fact that deno is node switched around 😏

Thanks!

Omar E. Lopez • May 11 '20

I think that we won't need some dependencies management basing in the fact that they are defined at the import statements using urls, which serves to identify them.

As deno has a bundler out of the box the intention should be that developers use this bundler and not third party options (Webpack, Parcel, Rollup), the same principle can by applied for testing , linting and formatting

Good question about different versions in the system, but the platform is shipped as a single executable so isn't hard build some tool like nvm

Thanks for your comment

Joe Sweeney • May 11 '20

Well, if you want to see a resource for ES6 import-compatible libraries (compatible with Deno), Pika looks like the best option right now.

Kamil Fronczak • May 10 '20

I would like to see example nestJS app on deno 🦄

Mansour Benyoucef ☕ • May 10 '20 • Edited

Me too

Adithya Sreyaj • May 11 '20

This is exciting

Yufan Lou • May 11 '20 • Edited

I am pretty much in agreement with Ben Awad's opinion in his video. Technically Deno is pretty cool, and I like TypeScript and Rust, but unless Deno has a blessed dependency management strategy and a good compatibility story with Nodejs and npm, I don't see it growing out of the niche easily.

Unfortunately, Deno is born out of Ryan Dahl's regrets about Nodejs, which means it would be hard for him to accept the same perceived warts back in.

EDIT: Or, if some huge communities decide to migrate to Deno entirely such as Angular, React or Vue, then that would boost Deno right out of niche too.

Omar E. Lopez • May 11 '20

I saw the video and I also agree with him , mainly the fact about the incompatibility between existing libraries and the new deno apis, it seem that this can be a issue in which the community will play a huge roll

Stephen Belovarich • May 11 '20 • Edited

"node" was brilliant from a marketing standpoint, I'm not so sure about "deno". I get it, deno is the letters in node rearranged. deno sounds friendly to me. When you have to convince devops to uptake a tool, "deno" sounds like a toy compared to "node" which sounds like it just belongs.

You'd be surprised how much naming really matters.

FWIW I like deno a lot. I appreciate some of the problems it solves and with Microsoft acquiring npm I want to move on. I honestly hope deno is the future.

Carlos Roso • May 13 '20

It's great for software itself; it's moving the ecosystem forward with new ideas. I like that.

Now, if this picks up, it'll certainly take 3 or 4 years for serious adoption - no company will be willing to switch their entire engineering to a whole new platform.

Sebastijan Grabar • May 11 '20

If this picks up pace, then, it will really be - one language for everything. With Node.js, you always had Node.js specific things (like their callback style for async actions, require(), exports etc.).

Promises for async methods - the best difference IMO.

Narasimha Sriharsha KANDURI • Aug 23 '20

i have few questions.
1) It doesn't have a centralized package management like package.json.
Q) Imagine you have two developers who install whatever they wish to get the work done. Does one need to check all those files to get the list of what dependencies are installed?

2)Secure by default. No file, network, or environment access, unless explicitly enabled.

Q) Is this a big thing? then do other languages have this feature by default? can't we manage by using user groups in unix based systems?

3)Supports TypeScript out of the box.
Q) can add type script support if i need whats the big deal?

4)Ships only a single executable file.
Q) i use linux and never had any problems like this can anyone explain why this is a big usp

5)Has built-in utilities like a dependency inspector (deno info) and a code formatter (deno fmt).
Q) npm, eslint and prettier => node + some scripts?

6)Has a set of reviewed (audited) standard modules that are guaranteed to work with Deno: deno.land/std
Q) does this mean all those tons of code on github which work with node are dead?

Adithya Sreyaj • May 11 '20

I really like to think Deno will become the next big thing in the JS ecosystem....

🦄N B🛡 • May 11 '20 • Edited

This mean that unlike Node when you we run our applications they by default don't have access to the file system, network or enviroment, for that we need enable them using some flags as command line options to allow access for example deno --allow-read=/etc

Explicit permissions.

Deno always dies on uncaught errors.

Less silly name

I have to admit, if the above pan out, there's a good chance I might hate it less than I hate Node.js/Node.JS/Node/NodeJS/justStopALready.

Craig McIlwrath • May 11 '20

Dependency by url is nice because there doesn't need to be a central repository, but it feels pretty cumbersome to use. URLs are long and hard to remember.

It gets worse if you want to use one dependency in multiple files. You have to copy the url across and upgrading a dependency means searching your entire code base for imports. This is worse than npm, imo

Omar E. Lopez • May 11 '20

In order to avoid this issue they defined imports maps you can check this video for a more detailed explanation , also the official repo has information about this topic.