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One of the original selling points of Deno seemed to be that it didn’t use NPM. It would build its own broadly useful and good standard library.

The NPM compatibility madness really does kill it for me. Probably something to do with taking VC money and “expanding addressable market” or whatever.

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I don't think it's that complicated, in my mind it's as simple as the fact that the npm/node ecosystem is huge and not supporting it at all means having to reinvent each and every library that exists there. That is a huge task and in my experience, the lack of support for npm/node packages (used to) really hamper deno's usefulness.

Now you can tap into the npm ecosystem when needed, but still use deno-first libraries as you please. If you don't like npm, then you can ignore it entirely

But that’s exactly what I’m saying, a big selling point WAS reinventing things. There would be a stdlib “http” package for all HTTP client needs, an “orm” package, and so on. This is how I remember Deno being sold many years ago, and I thought it was a noble cause.

> If you don't like npm, then you can ignore it entirely

But what if Deno had invested all that Node compat effort into something else?

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