Half-OT:
Anyone got experience with switching from Node.js to Deno?
What's better with Deno? What's still worse?
Anyone got experience with switching from Node.js to Deno?
What's better with Deno? What's still worse?
ts-node is good enough to stick to Node for now if you want TypeScript. I don't think the rest of Deno is that compelling, although I would probably switch to Deno once its Node compat is awesome since it is a more compelete package out of the box than Node is.
Deno's battle is that it is an incremental improvement, and competing JS runtimes is quickly become the new JS web framework meme alternative (Bun, Boa, Node, Deno)
How come?
#! /usr/bin/env node -r @swc-node/register
I use ts-node with the optional SWC compiler which works great with pretty darn fast startup times. SWC can handle TypeScript experimental decorators including emitting metadata, so not losing out on anything with it ATM.
Matters for what ? Doing every type of app ? Yeah, that's blocker.
But it doesn't really matter. Every language ecosystem that succeeds starts off lacking things.
Personally I prefer starting with it early and be part of that ecosystem.
Better: Seamless TypeScript support without having to deal with 3rd party packages or tsconfigs. A standard library modeled after Go's that is a WIP, but solid overall. Having browser APIs in the runtime is great, removes the mental context switch between browser/node. Formatter built in to the binary. YMMV, but I prefer the url imports and lack of package.json.
I can't speak from a professional standpoint of migrating a project from Node to Deno; honestly, I don't think it's worth doing that (yet). But Deno is far more enjoyable to me as a hobbyist programmer and working on solo projects. I recently deployed an app backend using just the std and the Deno port of postgres.js[0] to Deno Deploy and it was a breeze.
I also think it's a great starting point for anyone looking to learn JavaScript.
Scripting, tooling/IDE support (webstorm support is pretty good), documentation and standardization, infrastructure as code
> What's still worse?
Node/NPM compatibility is still hit or miss depending on the library you're trying to use, that's something Bun is trying to improve over Deno.
Also, typescript types feel very hacky and I feel that's something very important as one of Deno's biggest selling points is typescript first-class support, definitely typed is doing most of the heavy lifting but things aren't perfect.
Node/NPM compatibility is experimental, as it improves, this lack of Deno native packages should become less of an issue.
1. Standard library: Deno has so much better standard library, support for web standards, promises instead of callback, and need to reach out to third party modules lot less
2. Performance: Deno is focusing a lot on performance and it faster than node
3. Package management: No more gigabytes of node_modules, They just have URLs which are simpler to use
4. Versioned std library:node's standard library is packaged but for deno you can use different std library than deno version.
Whats worse:
1. Ecosystem: There are lot less packages for deno but Deno team is working on npm packages support. So all/most npm packages will work in deno
2. Deployment target: Deno has deno deploy but that pretty much it.
I'm doing regular HTTP stuff, so haven't been suffering with lack of libraries. Most things work just fine.