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Comment by 205g0 | Hacker News Reader

Please help me to understand: If I deploy my apps as Docker images anyway why would I need this? Deno 1.6 just packages the runtime creating a huge file, still smaller than a Docker image but with latter I have a better deployment experience meaning there's a huge ecosystem and tooling around. No rant, just trying to get what I miss.

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Even server side, not everyone uses Docker. If you’re deploying to EC2, in house hardware, whatever, a single executable is simpler. And even if you’re building a Docker image, building the image itself is still a bit simpler - just pop the executable in there, and have the Docker entry point execute it, that’s it.

Then obviously for CLI tools, this is SUPER nice.

Yes and no, these are amenities but they are really small and IDK if they justify hiding/abstracting way an import build step.

> Even server side, not everyone uses Docker.

IDK, tried to find alternatives the last years but for a bit more sophisticated app you can't ignore images and container orchestrators like k8s. And latter is still easier than anything I've seen and has by far the biggest ecosystem. If I want to host some minimal app, I just push an SSG to netlify/surge/vercel, it's not an integrated build step which makes my life easier.

> just pop the executable in there

Otherwise you would just need one more line in your build file (npm install).

> Then obviously for CLI tools, this is SUPER nice

Also, yes no, Deno "binaries" have huge file sizes compared to an npm install -g and rarely used CLI tools can be fired off with npx, so which problem is exactly solved? That I can offer CLI tools to folks who won't have node installed? Then I rather write my CLI tool in Go and offer an appropriate package size.

I welcome competition and hence Deno but think this feature doesn't fulfill any (relevant) use case. Only beginners who struggle with the build step (which can indeed get hairy) profit from this design decision but a bit more advanced users will miss the control they had before.

I like K8s too, especially for a service oriented architecture, but there’s tonnes of other deployment targets out there. I’d bet the overall percentage of server side software running on K8s is in the single digits, thought that’s a pure wild ass guess. Hours ago I just finished debugging an outage where requests to one K8s service, through K8s ingress, slowed down 10x after an insignificant deploy, and then we cycled the pods (without changing the code) and it sped up again. No idea why - K8s is complex, and many ppl choose not to take on that complexity. TONNES of people like being able to deploy a single executable to their servers, it’s part of Go’s popularity, part of the popularity of fat jars in Java land (and those still need a JVM!), etc.

As for CLIs, the Deno executable overhead is about 47 MBs. Not nothing, but also ... that’s like a few extra seconds of download time for the tool, and insignificant disk space when people have hundreds of GBs on their laptops. If I’m writing some sort of command line tool, the tool being 50 MBs bigger probably does nothing to hurt adoption. But it having zero external dependencies WILL help adoption, vs. npx and screwing around with proper node versions and whatnot.

I think you already answered the question. You don't need to introduce docker cli, docker daemon, a container registry, etc. Not saying theres anything wrong with docker but having options for application packaging is nice!

Exactly. The fewer moving parts, the better.

Even if you still use Docker, a container wrapping a single binary is simpler than a container with dependencies and source files.

It’s also good for closed source use cases (blasphemy, I know).

Ok, the Docker client stuff is not always exciting but once you want to deploy something small, say, an app server, a DB and something like nginx or Traefik you need some orchestrator, eg k8s and then you need again images. If you prefer containerd over Docker also good.

What I am saying is which orchestration and deployment system does favor single executables atm and has a huge ecosystem? You still need to create images and do double the work. I like real binaries like Go creates but repackaging the run-time doesn't sound like a sophisticated idea but rather making the black box even bigger.

As a sibling said, for client side/3rd party apps, yeah this might be a nice-to-have but this space has rather other challenges.

CLI tools and other things that don't get "deployed" would be one use case

You are talking about server side use cases mostly. This executable will come handy for variety 3rd party apps.

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