Deno🦕 - Is it a threat to Node?

Deno 1.0 is launched on 13th May 2020 by Ryan Dahl — the original creator of Node.js

It’s been around 2 years now, we are hearing the term “Deno” and developer community especially JavaScript one is quite excited since it is coming from the author of - Ryan Dahl. In this post, we will discuss a brief history of Deno and Node along with their salient features and popularity.

Deno was announced on JSConf EU 2018 by in his talk “10 Things I Regret About Node.js”. In his talk, Ryan mentioned his regrets about the initial design decisions with Node.js.

In his JSConf presentation, he explained the regrets while developing Node.js like Not sticking with Promises, Security, The Build System (GYP), package.json and node_modules, etc. But in the same presentation after explaining all the regret, he launched his new work named Deno.🦕 It was in the process of development then.

But on 13th May 2020, around 2 years later yesterday, Deno 1.0 launched by Ryan and the team (Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder, and Bartek Iwańczuk). So let’s talk about some features of Deno.

First, let’s try to find out what the heck is Deno?

1. Chrome V8 — JavaScript Runtime Engine
2. Rust Programming language
3. Tokio — A runtime for writing reliable, asynchronous, and slim applications.

Installation Steps:

curl -fsSL //deno.land/x/install/install.sh | sh

brew install deno

A basic Hello-World program in Deno looks like the following (same as in Node.js):

console.log("Hello world");

We will try to compare the features of Deno with Node throughout the post. And in the end, will try to find out is it really a threat or not?

There is no doubt that Node.Js is a huge success JavaScript runtime environment. Today, more than thousands of production build is using Node.js. Another reason for this success is NPM - a package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js which has millions of reusable libraries and packages for every JavaScript developer out there.

Node is a decade old now since it was initially launched on May 27, 2009. On the other hand, Deno is relatively very new. Still, not used in the production build much. It could be used to create web servers like Node.js, perform scientific computations, etc.

Highlighted features of Deno 🎆

1. Secure - No file, network, or environment access by default. 👁‍🗨
2. Ships only a single executable file.1⃣
3. Say No to node_modules and package.json.❌
4. TypeScript support out of the box. 🤝

1. Security

deno run index.ts

deno run --allow-read --allow-net index.ts

2. Single executable file

3. Module system

import { serve } from "//deno.land/[email protected]/http/server.ts";
for await (const req of serve({ port: 8000 })) {
  req.respond({ body: "Hello from Deno\n" });
}

4. Typescript Support

Deno is a new runtime for executing JavaScript and TypeScript outside of the web browser like Node.js But it’s important to understand that Deno is not an extension of Node — it’s completely a newly written implementation. 

- a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.

Slowly, Deno is also getting popular like Node.js. You can see the popularity by Deno’s official twitter handle with and 50k+ stars on Github .

Limitations of Deno 😞

1. Deno is not compatible with Node (NPM) packages. Huge disappointment for the big JavaScript dev community.
2. Since it uses Typescript compiler internally to parse the code to plain JavaScript, it is still very slow comparatively.
3. It lags in HTTP server performance.

As in 2020, Deno is not at all a threat to Node.