Admittedly I haven't looked into Deno a great deal yet, but I'm having trouble imagining production level software at this point given that a lot of proven and tested open source frameworks and tools such as express, create-react-app, electron, webpack, and their hundreds of dependencies, assume the use of npm or CJS modules require syntax. Would these packages and their dependencies have to be rewritten?
I hope not, but if so I do feel like we'd be seeing yet another split in the javascript ecosystem and a whole new world of compatibility concerns that would not be a "great developer experience." I've already noticed a number of people creating their own versions of popular packages for Deno and I can't help but feel they might not get the same support as the originals. I wonder if Deno could perhaps add some kind of compatability layer.
Senior Fullstack Engineer with 10+ years of proven track record of delivering software at scale in startup and enterprise environments. I am most comfortable working across the stack with JavaScript,
That's a really good point. The code amount of code relying on Node is right now huge and the added features do not pay off for now(my opinion).
"I wonder if Deno could perhaps add some kind of compatibility layer." -- I really wonder how that would work. If one could translate the calls to the Node APIs to Deno APIs that might just work as long as we keep performance in mind.
A node polyfill is currently under development in the Deno std library. You can see the docs and progress here: github.com/denoland/deno/tree/mast.... Still in it's infancy but growing. Supporting node packages would certainly ease the transition for developers.
Senior Fullstack Engineer with 10+ years of proven track record of delivering software at scale in startup and enterprise environments. I am most comfortable working across the stack with JavaScript,
Admittedly I haven't looked into Deno a great deal yet, but I'm having trouble imagining production level software at this point given that a lot of proven and tested open source frameworks and tools such as express, create-react-app, electron, webpack, and their hundreds of dependencies, assume the use of npm or CJS modules require syntax. Would these packages and their dependencies have to be rewritten?
I hope not, but if so I do feel like we'd be seeing yet another split in the javascript ecosystem and a whole new world of compatibility concerns that would not be a "great developer experience." I've already noticed a number of people creating their own versions of popular packages for Deno and I can't help but feel they might not get the same support as the originals. I wonder if Deno could perhaps add some kind of compatability layer.
That's a really good point. The code amount of code relying on Node is right now huge and the added features do not pay off for now(my opinion).
"I wonder if Deno could perhaps add some kind of compatibility layer." -- I really wonder how that would work. If one could translate the calls to the Node APIs to Deno APIs that might just work as long as we keep performance in mind.
Maybe that's even a project worth pursuing.
A node polyfill is currently under development in the Deno std library. You can see the docs and progress here: github.com/denoland/deno/tree/mast.... Still in it's infancy but growing. Supporting node packages would certainly ease the transition for developers.
Looks like the way to go. Thanks Chris!