Two years ago the creator of NodeJS Ryan Dahl announced Deno a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, in this talk where he talked about the 10 things he regret about NodeJS and in the end of the talk he presented Deno and the motives behind it, why he is building this new JS runtime.
The 13 of May Deno 1.0 was released (here is the official blog post). By the end of the day every tech blog was sharing blog posts about Deno and some developers even started saying NodeJS is dead! like are you serious guys ?!
This is what we always see in the tech community when a new technology come to life the next day every other technology is dead, just take a second and remember how React Native was dead after announcing the first version of Flutter, since that and React Native continue to improve day by day and nothing is dead but the blog post about it :D
The short answer is NO! NodeJS is not dead and won’t be anytime soon, a lot of companies use it in production and the community around NodeJS is really big.
In the other side Deno come with a lot of improvements (which this post is about) so let’s talk about that now.
Here is a quick list of Deno features :
- It is based on "modern" JS features.
- It has TypeScript at its core, this may help it gain popularity, you don’t have to separately compile TypeScript, it’s automatically done by Deno.
- It embraces ES modules.
- It has no package manager.
- It has a first-class await.
- It aims to be browser-compatible as much as it can, for example by providing a built-in fetch and the global window object.
What I find cool about Deno, is the TypeScript support out of the box. As we see nowadays TypeScript is getting more popular than ever which will help Deno gain popularity, of course let’s not forget about the security improvements.
Finaly, I hope to not see an HR agent posting “Hiring! Senior Deno developer with +3 years of exp ONLY”
Feel free to leave your opinion on this in the comments section ;)
I post my thoughts in my LinkedIn profile.
Sources:
https://deno.land
https://deno.land/v1
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-deno-handbook/#will-it-replace-node-js
Top comments (8)
Anyone who says node.js is dead probably hasn't even tried building anything with deno yet, I think.
Also, I don't see anything wrong with them both coexisting. I'm pretty sure, in time, deno will find it's place alongside node.js, but I'm not sure it has to necessarily be a replacement.
Exactly my point, thank you for this comment.
Don't you think that every time there is something new in town, some "developers" start calling the other alternatives "dead" like are you serious ! this is why the title of this post is the way it is lol
One other important point is that Deno isn't compatible with the multitude of packages available for Ndke via NPM. The à sense of these packages means that the wheel needs to be reinvented for hundreds of thousands of packages, just to get Deno to where Node already is.
Also, not à huge fan of the global window scope. Imo, it's not a feature of JavaScript, it's a Web API, and should be left on the Web. Code running in the browser, and code running in Deno/Node will always be different, because they're different environments. We're never going to reach a stage where the same file can be run on Node and in the browser to do different things.
Thanks for your comments on the subject, very interesting thoughts you shared with us!
Nodejs will never die. I love deno but the "module system" makes me wanna puke.
Also there are a lot of people talking about security - while that's true, I doubt it will ever be the main selling point for deno.
I think it's better scripting platform than node.js for the sake of fast executables and natural typescript support.
I kind of like the module system haha. Although having many
importstatements at the start of each file could get messy, I think it's cleaner then package.json, and removes the reliance on NPM. I don't like e commercial nature of NPM, but I like the potential to be able to import from any URL, without having all the overheadGood thought on this. I appreciate your comment, thank you ! package.json + node_modules folder is something a lot of developers don't like. I will keep experimenting with Deno in my free time and see what the future will bring.
Thank you for this thoughts on the matter, i agree with you on the security part ;)