Thank You, Deno | Hacker News Reader

Thank You, Deno

vlt.io

131 pointsjcbhmr33 comments

> Deno 1.0 shipped in 2020 on the original terms, & then spent the next four years walking them back one piece at a time. First the deps.ts convention, one file that re-exported every URL: a manifest in all but name. Then lock.json, an integrity hash per URL: a lockfile. Then import maps, so you could write bare specifiers again.

I object to two of these categorisations.

deps.ts was a convention, not a built-in runtime feature. If you want to follow the convention, that's fine. It's just a regular old typescript file!

Import maps were not Deno walking back, but implementing a web platform feature. Parity with browser JS was a standout feature of Deno from the beginning. This was walking forwards if anything.

However, broadly, the story is indeed one of Deno moving away from its opinionated roots towards pragmatism (drop-in replacement for Node).

Thanks for calling that out, it also stood out to me as "falsy".

You're arguing with an LLM.

> & then spent the next four years walking them back one piece at a time

I feel like the meat proxy changed "and" to '&' here; LLMs don't use ampersands like that, presumably because it's not really grammatically correct.

But the rest of the phrase itself is very obvious AI slop.

You make it sound as if implementation details matter. They don't.

I'm really sad about the announcement and that the Deno runtime as it was is going away. I'll definitely be following and likely using an active fork if it presents one.

I've been using Deno a lot for straight shell scripting. Being able to link directly to dependencies and run without a separate install step or node_modules directory is huge. The fact that it's a single binary download and can self update is so nice too.

I'm not sure if these features are similar for Bun or not. I'm just sad about the whole thing.

Bun supports this if your dependencies are npm packages: https://bun.sh/docs/runtime/auto-install

It is also a single self-contained binary and has a self-updater.

There's a fork-in-progress called "Dodo," the Discord server is quickly filling up. https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/37030#issuecomment-6...

Dodo aims to be a drop-in replacement.

Then there's Ende, my fork, and I ripped out Node compatibility, Deploy, KV, Jupyter, &c. https://ende.sh

TIL that &c means etc. I just spent more time than I'd like to admit googling for "&c" thinking it was some kind of FFI functionality or something xD

Haha! Happy to spread awareness! I saw it being used somewhere several years ago and loved it.

The et in etc (et cetera) being Latin "and" (in essentially "and so forth"). The ampersand is said to have started as a very stylized "E" and "t" merged together, so it does have an interesting historic appropriateness in &c.

& is literally a combination of the letters e and t, for et, et cetera.

Thank you deno!

You are added to the list of projects I thought would really become essential to my work but slowly faded away. Another one, for example is rethinkdb.

At least Deno actually caused some movement in the node world, just like io.js.

And thank you for the coolest, funniest, smartest product announcement vid ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swXWUfufu2w

> Bun joined Anthropic ten months ago. The tempting conclusion is that the alternative-runtime experiment is over & Node has won by default.

Well, Bun is surprisingly better and convenient than before

I can just echo that thank you!

Even as a big Deno "hater" due to their anti-package manager stance on the basis of URLs that leads to a sleuth of dependency attacks, I must say that Deno and the people behind it have undoubtedly pushed the space forward on many aspects!

I guess between the original Node and the many alternatives that aren't Node (that I, a former PHP guy using Go for side projects, wish would gain more traction) there isn't enough of a niche for a "mostly like Node, but with fewer warts" project?

Partly yes, but I also I think more than expected Node has been able to fix a lot of the warts itself within the existing model, which really undermines the niche further.

I think it was more a question of what that niche was meant to be. Bun does alright in the "we don't want external dependencies" space of Node development. We switched a lot of our Go projects to it because it allows us to use nothing but Microsoft packages for Azure and Bun, similar to how we were using Go, but now we have a language less. Bun is largely a dropin for node though, and it would be rather easy to switch back.

> Bun joined Anthropic ten months ago. The tempting conclusion is that the alternative-runtime experiment is over & Node has won by default.

Well, Bun is surprisingly better than before

Node has a bright future. See e.g. Platformatic's "Watt" server^1 for an example of pushing it forward.

1. https://platformatic.dev/ and https://github.com/platformatic#-watt--the-nodejs-applicatio...

I do hope there will be forks. Some are mentioned in the comments.

Bun and Deno are now big-tech dependent. For the better, and the worse.

I do think those of us who were long skeptical of Deno are owed a small "I told you so".

Fundamentally, there is a big sect of the JavaScript ecosystem / culture that is hype-driven and has extreme churn. Jumping to every new framework and runtime without thought for the long-term, or any regard for historical patterns.

This stuff keeps happening. Somehow I'd love to get through to the perpetuators of the JS hype treadmill that they're only hurting themselves and making themselves look foolish when the churn inevitably hurts them and the wider ecosystem.

But maybe they jumped to the next shiny thing after Deno before Demo's demise was announced, and they'll learn nothing.

You should read the article; it's well thought out, and it directly addresses your points and what was learned by the ecosystem. That would be a more interesting thing to argue about.

It was written by an LLM.

I was often curious to/wanted to deploy little applets on their publishing platform/utilize their in-language db. I was always scared of what would happen to my app/db in the future. Well, what is happening to those deno deploy apps?

From the announcement: "Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers."

Congratuation to Deno team for a great software and the recent move. I'm using it as my scripting runtime for the agent harness, work great, now I may go back to Node.js.

Cloudflare acquires Deno

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019911

Considering forking it (and rewriting to C++)

For that, we already have Node.js.

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