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Comment by anyfactor | Hacker News Reader

What is the reality of Deno now?

I remember when Deno was being developed it was promoted like how Web3 is being promoted right now. But browsing through hundreds of job posts I have not seen anyone having Deno as a requirement. Everyone wants Typescript+Node and that's about it.

Size of community, enterprise use and approachability as the first framework to learn. I think these 3 factors determine the success of any programming related stuff. Performance on the other hand is what people talk about. But nobody cares about performance irl.

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I think they will slowly close the functionality gap until Deno does the most common 80% of stuff Node does.

Then you factor in how Deno will be fundamentally more performant - we will see large companies who can't squeeze another cycle out of Node write blog posts about how they switched to Deno.

And lastly, NPM is a tire fire. The left-pad and faker hits will keep coming, on top of an almost daily procession of new security vulnerabilities in deep dependency trees. Something so bad could happen here that ppl sour on Node.

So I think Deno stands a chance. They just need to keep implementing and bide their time. A moment could come.

Deno is betting on edge computing to explode and offers a good offering (Deno Deploy) in that space leveraging how it has a smaller API and faster startup times than Node.

It also thinks that edge computing is a good space to leverage the myriad of web APIs it supports + there are certain workloads that it does better than Node (like single executable)

It won’t take long to get it popping. You just need a few tech blog posts from well known startup with a headline that reads ‘How we switched from Node to Deno’, and voila, the snowball just got rolling.

Copy cat culture will do the rest.

It is about ability to find talent who does not have to figure out everything not really about copying.

Only few companies have the budgets, talent and the motivation (do cool new things and blog) to experiment with drastic changes like deno.

Rest of us can only afford to maybe try once they do make it popular and there is enough material online SO/GitHub projects /libraries/blog posts to learn from someone else's experience.

Most engineering teams cannot afford to be trailblazers

My personal prediction is that Deno is never going to take off. It's just not a significant enough improvement over Node.js that abandoning the existing ecosystem is worth it.

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