Hacker News Reader

Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

Deno is highly unlikely to replace Node. Instead it will just inspire some forward improvements in Node just like the node.js / io.js fork did back in 2014.

io.js was separate from Node for a while, had a few core passionate fans, but didn't really see widespread adoption. It inspired node.js maintainers to do better though and eventually the two projects merged together and Node became better for it.

JS itself has been around for 24 years now and has gradually evolved over the years with new keywords and functionalities to keep up with the times. Node has done the same, and can easily adopt many of the things that Deno has.

View on HN

The difference is that io.js started as a fork, and Deno starts with the premise that node has many fundamental design flaws that can only be fixed with a rewrite.

Perhaps some of the solutions in Deno can be ported to node, but others certainly can't. For example, there's so much dependency on node-gyp that it's unlikely it will ever go away.

By porting Deno's features to node you will be introducing so many backward compatibility issues and friction that it will be the same as porting your libraries and applications to Deno.

I agree, Deno at least won't take off for a couple of years. Many libraries are missing and companies are not that willing to rewrite their apps again. Unless the community abandons Node suddenly, it will be around but its market share will decline surely. If they can borrow some Deno features then the chance of Node dying will be very slim. Two that I find extremely useful are: url import and security. On the hand, if on Deno side they build a compatibility layer with NPM, then it becomes the market de-facto.

If Deno could run popular node libraries as-is then it’d be an easy sell but imo, except for security, the issues it solves doesn’t outweigh the cost of migration, if possible at all.

Right. If io.js couldn't become popular enough to fully replace node.js even with backwards cross compatibility with existing NPM packages then Deno is an even harder sell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com