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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I played with an early version of Deno a few years back and it was already way more comfortable to use than node. It's a real counterexample to second-system syndrome.

The only reason I didn't continue was a lack of ARM support.

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Surprised this is the case because I use their Rust v8 bindings on an ARM laptop almost every day. Have you tried building it from source?

It was a few years back and I was mainly playing with a few early projects. I was very productive, but wanted to target my Raspberry Pi and it just wasn't there. I ended up going 100% rust instead.

There are still no RPi builds as far as I am aware, which is a shame as there are now Mac silicon builds so not sure what the hold up is. I do wonder if there are.more Raspberry Pi's out there than M1/M2 Macs :)

Someone is doing the builds here - been using them and seem ok: https://github.com/LukeChannings/deno-arm64

The M1 builds are made manually by us, as github doesnt provide any runners. the same problem does apply for linux arm, however we don't have any arm linux systems any one of the members use; and building on a pi is a no-go, as that can take 70+ minutes, so that would make our release cycle a lot more complicated. Either way, we are investigating potential possibilities besides waiting for github to have runners available

Have you tried building in a rpi virtual machine on a Mac? I have no idea what the performance would look like, but it’d be easy enough to try, especially since you are already managing your own max builders.

I want to say I followed these instructions for doing so recently:

https://gist.github.com/plembo/c4920016312f058209f5765cb9a3a...

I had a very different experience. I very much wanted to make it work, but trying to use it with existing npm packages and import maps was incredibly painful, and I ultimately switched over to node for that project.

Haven't tried import maps, but so long as the npm package uses ES Modules and doesn't rely on Node specific APIs, you should be good to go.

What made it "way more comfortable" for you?

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