from Hacker News

An Update on Fresh

by agos on 5/15/25, 3:30 PM with 62 comments

• by roxolotl on 5/15/25, 4:36 PM

  I think there’s a universe in which Deno took off but it’s clearly not ours. I’m inclined to believe this is because what Deno is trying for, a more mature standards based and security focused version of the JavaScript ecosystem, isn’t what people use JavaScript for. Makes me sad because I really appreciate what they are trying to do.

• by bpev on 5/15/25, 4:54 PM

  Haven't really been using Fresh; I feel like whenever I get into the blending of client/server with these ecosystems, things get real muddy real fast. Mostly been doing either sites (mostly fully ssr with Hono + very light vanilla), or fully client-rendered web pwas (solid or mithril).

  Deno itself, though, is still a very comfy js environment. I pretty much use it for all js/ts that doesn't run in the browser (I also use it for build steps of said browser code). It just kinda has everything I need/want, so I don't have to add too many dependencies, and don't have to muck around in build/env stuff. Just feels kinda easy.

• by Imustaskforhelp on 5/15/25, 4:03 PM

  I am not sure, deno seems really bleak as I had read the HN post about deno actively shrinking its datacenters and fresh activity.

  This seems an attempt to show to the world that its not that, but I would say that it's still not working.

  Deno deploy, their product is better on supabase or even bunny cdn which provides more locations than deno itself.

  Bun also exists. And did we forget about node itself?

  Cloudflare workers is a beast if we can work with non standards/ I personally feel a little bit that some code meant for node won't work on cf as much as it would on deno

• by aarestad on 5/15/25, 4:23 PM

  A bit of Deno trivia: it runs the big "Chicago Brick" video wall in Google's main office in Fulton Market; they open-source the code here:

  https://github.com/google/chicago-brick

  (I contributed a little "Penrose-tile" module during my time there, though I never got it in production :P)

• by 65 on 5/15/25, 6:03 PM

  The Fresh home page has a routing bug on it (https://fresh.deno.dev)

  Scroll down to "Stream HTML straight from the server" -> Click "Lemonade" recipe link -> Click "Learn more about Partials" Button -> Press back button -> Press back button again -> Press forward button = The raw Lemonade recipe HTML partial gets rendered instead of the full page.

  Or just go here straight from this link: https://fresh.deno.dev/recipes/lemonade

  Maybe they should add some logic to prevent being able to load partials as their own page.

• by globalise83 on 5/15/25, 4:42 PM

  Super excited about Fresh 2.0

  I believe that Fresh is pretty ideal for AI-paired web development since so much information about the application structure is easily parsable just by iterating through the file system (routes are folders and files). I have been using Claude Desktop MCP server with Fresh 1.0 and Claude can "read" the application pretty well.

• by simlevesque on 5/15/25, 5:07 PM

  Fresh is awesome. I have a couple of commercial products running it right now and I find it very fast to develop with.

  It powers my friend's canadian roasted coffee business website, available here: https://torque.cafe/en/

• by dfee on 5/15/25, 6:34 PM

  I’ve been checking every couple weeks for a status update on Fresh for the last six months (others have been checking longer, it’s a vocal set of early adopters on GH and discord!).

  I’m not even sure I’d have confidence in adopting Fresh, but I definitely was using it as a canary for the Deno org’s health. If they can’t maintain their flagship front end framework, after all, they must be circling the drain?

  If that’s not the situation, I’m bewildered by their approach to communication.

  Anyway, I’m still left wondering if Deno will be around in 18mo. It’s generally a nice DX, but so risky to bet on. I want them to succeed, but fear they won’t.

• by lucacasonato on 5/15/25, 4:34 PM

  Happy to answer any questions :)

• by enz on 5/15/25, 5:15 PM

  Using Fresh (v1) for a commercial project, mostly SSR with a very few islands. So far it has been great for my productivity and it’s reasonably fast for our purposes (we run it on a VPS, not Deno Deploy)

• by andrewl-hn on 5/15/25, 4:41 PM

  On a meta level: after decades of VC-speak overuse on the internet any headline that says "An update on Thing" reads as "We are shutting Thing down". So, people who decide not to read this article may simply assume that this is another piece of bad news about Deno.

  It is not: the post talks about the development progress of their web framework, which seems to be their take on server-rendered pages with islands of interactivity. Kinda like Astro or maybe like Remix.

• by xmorse on 5/15/25, 4:38 PM

  A Fresh update

• by watusername on 5/15/25, 5:19 PM

  Please do not title your posts "An Update On X" if you aren't shutting it down. You can blame the SV startups for the connotation but that's where we're at now. But in this case, I guess it has worked as a form of clickbait :)