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Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

Still no Node or npm compatibility? Not even on their roadmap? Still think Deno is DOA, then.

TypeScript is great, sure. I love TypeScript. But I wouldn't touch Deno for just about any serious development if I couldn't be certain that I could search npm for a library and use it without a potential hassle.

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It's like wanting to convert a Tesla into a hybrid. Replacing npm with url imports was one of the main motivations to create deno. I don't miss npm at all. I am happy that I don't have to deal with it anymore. But if you want npm you can just continue using node.

What issues were npm giving you?

Most of the issues are just stemming from its centralized nature. Typo squatting for example and other security issues. Beyond that the whole ecosystem around npm is just so bloated. The amount of data you have to pull for any tiny project is ridiculous.

Granted some of those issues is just down to growth of the ecosystem, so it could happen to deno as well. But my hope is that deno community will not repeat most of past mistakes. And it's decentralized nature will help with that.

Npm is great, but it's not ideal to structurally depend on a centralized service for normal functioning.

So it's doa because it shedded some fairly major legacy tech debt in npm and the commonJS format?

While I have concerns about the dependency management style of deno being looser than node's package.json, I do think it is a net positive with realigning to "web standard library" over reinventing interfaces for everything.

This is the greatest reason to switch to Deno. NPM is, in most cases, a dumpster fire. If you need 1000+ dependencies to write a couple lines of code you have failed and I want nothing to do with you, your team, or any of your code.

If Deno succeeds it will be no different.

Not so sure of that - if only because it aims to have a pretty reasonable stdlib built-in.

There is a compatibility library https://deno.land/std@0.83.0/node. But they're at about 10 out of 35 for the Node Standard Lib. And There is no way to handle Node libs that use node-gyp - although I don't think that's _most_ modules.

If they finish the compatibility layer, I think that's enough for most scenarios.

> Still think Deno is DOA, then

Never has there been a community as obsessed with the new hotness as the JS one. People will use it just so they can say they do

That can’t keep a project alive.

Next year something else is the new hotness and the people who like that move on.

What do you need npm for when you can just import modules from skypack or some other cdn?

Even if you don’t use the npm CLI per se, the npm ecosystem is huge. Losing access to that is a really big deal.

Most of it isn’t Typescript though.

And even what's typescript is only usable as javascript+.d.ts. Each package has it's own tsconfig.

How does skypack work? Does it have automatically what npm has?

No NPM support is by far the best thing about Deno for me.

You can use all of npm in deno if you link to them via www.skypack.dev

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