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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

I am perplexed by the focus on this. Clearly there are excellent devs working on Deno — but what setups are you running that the actual build is holding your productivity back? Developing in node/ts or rails I don't think it would move the needle in the slightest for me. It's simply not an issue outside of my brain finding beauty in any kind of optimization.

Is that all this is?

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Deno has a hard time innovating and the reason adoption has been low in my opinion is that Node is good enough and has a lot of these features anyway (esm, easy ts support, https imports, web apis like fetch etc).

They are trying to innovate and coming up with differentiators and reasons to use the platform. If you had to ask me when I met Ryan 5 years ago in JSConf EU before he introduced deno - I would have assumed they'd have 30% market share by now (of server JS) but Node has been able to "catch up" to complaints quickly enough (I think) and Deno's selling points like edge computing and fast startup aren't super important for msot devs in most use cases in practice and there are other runtimes for different clouds (like cloudflare workers).

That said - it is still really good they are trying to innovate and while I find the marketing speak shitty and somewhat in bad faith - I still think it's really good they're innovating and I'm very much in favor of that and hope they find something important enough to solve to get big.

When you’re trying to run a quick script or just want a “playground” environment where you can test your code, it holds you back.

For example: I’m making a web app with Svelte in TypeScript and I’m trying to test a part of its code. To do that, I have to build the app first because TypeScript needs transpiling which in turn needs bundling etc…

With SvelteKit, vite dev will hot-reload things on the fly as you save files. Definitely not worth this amount of brittle complexity to avoid.

Developers creating problems they can solve later and call it progress.

Idk, its another way of doing something that for some people could be very important. I've had Next apps take 5 minutes to start, with 1 minute single-page build times in local dev. So yeah, pretty easy to calc the payoff of speeding that up.

I think that people mistake building/ bundling js with compiling js. even when you use bundlers, the code still needs to be compiled by the JIT. so bundling is really kind of a weird step that makes web dev different afaik. they're trying to turn browser dev into a standardized scripting environment and stop the silly browsers from trying to innovate in what should be user-dev space. That's my idealistic take at least.

personally I've been using vanilla es6 for years and not bundling, because I dont care about mobile safari, and I love it.

As far as learning typescript, Deno is great in that it allows you to focus on typescript the language. Rather than the environment setup, config, compiling, etc…

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