from Hacker News

Deno in 2023

by olestr on 2/5/24, 9:23 AM with 228 comments

• by ogoffart on 2/5/24, 11:46 AM

  I'm interrested in the WebGPU feature.

  With Slint [1] we're working on a framework which allow to make a desktop GUI in Javascript/Typescript, without bringing a browser/webview. Currently, we do it by using binaries through napi-rs so we can bring in a window using the platform native API. And then we do some hack to merge the event loops.

  But if Deno supports bringing up a window directly, this means we can just ship wasm instead of native binary for all platform. And also I hope event loop integration will be simplified.

  Although we'd also need more API than just showing a window (mouse and keyboard input, accessibility, popup window, system tray, ...)

  [1] https://slint.dev

  Edit: I got excited a bit too early. The WebGPU feature doesn't include the API to launch a Window. One still need to rely on an extra library binary.

• by dingdingdang on 2/5/24, 11:31 AM

  Would love to see the compile situation fixed - the generated executables are ~90MB+ at this stage and do now allow compression without erroring out. Deploying ala Golang is not feasible at that level but could well be down the line if this dev branch is picked up again!

  The exe output grew from from ~50MB to plus ~90MB from 2021 to 2024: https://github.com/denoland/deno/discussions/9811 which mean Deno is worse than Node.js's pkg solution by a decent margin.

• by pachico on 2/5/24, 1:11 PM

  I'm not a big fan of JavaScript but I admit I stayed away from it because I dislike nodejs and npm terribly.

  I was forced to start coding again in JS some weeks ago and I wanted to try Deno. I must say it's been a very smooth and fast experience so far. Very well done!

• by wldlyinaccurate on 2/5/24, 10:10 AM

  I deployed my first non-trivial Deno app to production in 2023. There were some teething issues with learning to keep the lock file in sync, especially in a repo with multiple entry points each with separate lock files. Some of the granular permissions stuff didn't work how I expected, to the point where I almost gave up and just allowed network to/from all hosts. But overall the experience was good, and I have positive feelings towards Deno. I look forward to seeing where they take it.

• by olestr on 2/5/24, 9:48 AM

  You can join the waitlist in the sneak peak of JSR linked in the end of the article: https://jsr.io/waitlist

  I'm curious on what the Deno team is building here.

• by kebman on 2/5/24, 12:57 PM

  "Jupyter, the open source notebook tool, added support for JavaScript and TypeScript using Deno. This means data science, visualization, and more can all be done using modern JavaScript and TypeScript and web standards APIs."

  I love this! At the same time, who would want to do this, given Python's excellent support for numbers and mathematics? And what about Haskell?

• by apatheticonion on 2/5/24, 11:34 PM

  Deno is such a great project. I would love to see greater support for embedding it into a Rust host process.

  I'm writing a JavaScript bundler and need a Node.js runtime to execute plugins. Deno's executable has fantastic Node support (at least, good enough for my use case) however the deno-core crate is super barebones and difficult to embed.

  At this stage I can't simply add the deno runtime into my Rust application, I need to copy/paste internal crates from the Deno executable and wire them up myself (without documentation on how).

  I'd love to see expansion for my use case - Deno could become the "plugin runtime" for the JS tooling world if it had a nice embed story.

  Right now I am just going with a Nodejs child process that I talk to from the Rust host process using stdio. In my tests, the stdio approach has 10x the communication latency when compared to an embedded Deno runtime (that adds ~1 second per round trip message in a project with 100k assets)

• by rtcode_io on 2/5/24, 9:40 AM

  Deno Deploy dropped from 35 GCP regions to just 12: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127598

• by brodo on 2/5/24, 11:37 AM

  I use Deno as a Javascript/Typescript-REPL. It has syntax-highlighting built-in.

• by agos on 2/5/24, 4:01 PM

  I'd love to use Fresh but a framework for web development which calls itself v1.x and yet only supports Tailwind for styling purposes feels very immature.

  The fact that for the next iteration they are prioritizing view transitions and not CSS bundling is baffling.

• by tarruda on 2/5/24, 9:48 AM

  What is the state of Deno's node.js compatibility when compared to Bun?

• by cactusfrog on 2/5/24, 7:55 PM

  I’ve used Jupyter notebooks with deno decently. They seem much better than Python Jupyter notebooks because of the lack of pain around dependency management.

• by simlevesque on 2/5/24, 8:44 PM

  I deployed 3 projects on Deno last year and I'm planning on launching 2 websites in the next couple of months. Mix of personal projects and some for clients.

  Deno Deploy just works, albeit the cold start can be slow but I'm now using an hybrid setup with Fresh routes backed by a CDN.

  The dev experience is great. I've used a couple of other solutions similar (Next, Nuxt and vite-ssr-plugin) and I sometimes I need to do somethings manually that would already exist on other platforms but in the end my projects stay simpler.

  I love saaskit [1] and Netzo [2]

  [1] https://deno.com/saaskit [2] https://github.com/netzo/netzo

• by msoad on 2/5/24, 10:39 AM

  If Deno is looking for more growth they should make it super easy to run Next.js with it

• by andsoitis on 2/5/24, 2:45 PM

  what is a great comparison between Bun, Deno, and Node.js?

  Why should I choose Bun over Deno or vice versa?

• by ohnoesjmr on 2/6/24, 12:29 AM

  I still haven't figured out how to bring in a deno "app", a cli tool, into an air-gapped environment. There is literally zero docs and everything assumes you are connected to the internet. The whole thing is too magical, and has no hope in the corporate world.

• by bheadmaster on 2/5/24, 12:04 PM

  It is interesting to me that none of the new NodeJS alternatives support multithreading. Why is that?

  Is it just a side-effect of using V8 engine for the heavy lifting, or is it some part of the ECMAScript specification which forbids multithreaded implementations of the language?

• by asim on 2/5/24, 11:35 AM

  Is anyone a user of Deno KV? What's your experience been like?

• by nerder92 on 2/5/24, 9:43 AM

  I'm really interested in deno, but I didn't yet have the chance to test it properly.

  I would love for this year to see the runtime support for either Google Cloud Functions or AWS Lambdas

• by MadSudaca on 2/5/24, 11:00 AM

  I know it sound silly but I love the aesthetic behind Deno's brand, it makes me want to use it for one project or another. Node.js is so old now. it's reliable but boring. I want something new, bold, and daring. Node.js is not it, although it was ~11 years ago. It's interesting how our views change.

• by nikisweeting on 2/6/24, 6:20 AM

  Awesome work Deno team! I've been hard on ya'll in the past to add NPM package support and I can now officially retract all of my earlier criticisms.

  It's amazing to see Deno mature so fast while staying well-thought-out, and I'm excited to use it in as many projects as I can now.

• by apitman on 2/5/24, 9:43 PM

  Are there any libraries or frameworks to facilitate writing code that accesses things like the filesystem and network, but also works in Node, Deno, and Bun (bunodeno)?

• by winrid on 2/5/24, 5:11 PM

  Is Deno using the same request/response buffer sizes as Node in those benchmarks?

• by ecmascript on 2/5/24, 11:00 AM

  I have a deno app in production and it is working just fine. However, I still think node is superior when you self host when you are not using docker. Deno afaik still doesn't support any way of running one process for every CPU like the cluster module in Node.js.

  I like to run my shit on the metal and without Docker and it feels like Deno was designed to run on Docker or some other kind of virtual containerized environment.

  However, you can run it on node thanks to pm2, but I guess why even run on Deno in the first place?

• by brightball on 2/5/24, 12:54 PM

  Sounds like it would be a great talk for a polyglot event like the Carolina Code Conference…

• by mongrelion on 2/5/24, 2:08 PM

  Slightly off topic but I just came here to show appreciation for the hang glider in the picture.

  Shout out to all my fellow hang gliders.

• by a3w on 2/5/24, 12:57 PM

  Shouldn't the HN title be *Deno in 2023 (2024)*,

  so we know::

  - it is not about a discussion of deno being new, relevant or modern in 2023, and

  - avoid thinking that the article is from 2023?

• by bmwolf102990 on 2/5/24, 11:46 AM

  Interestingly, Deno and Node were both originally developed by the same person, Ryan Dahl.

  Why did he feel the need to build a competitor to his own product? Whatever features are supposed to make Deno "better" than Node...why didn't he just work on integrating them into Node?

  I understand that sometimes changes to software can be infeasible, especially if they are large fundamental/foundational changes, but this is still a bit of a head scratcher to me.

• by mborch on 2/5/24, 11:54 AM

  > A program run with Deno has no file, network, or environment access unless explicitly enabled.

  You can do this using containerization technology, no need to invent this per language runtime.