Deno: the future of Node?
Deno 1.0 launched a few days ago. What is it and, do you need to learn it?
On May 13th, Ryan Dahl and his team launched the first stable version of Deno, a “secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript”.
Some guys launching a JS runtime, why should I care?
Well. First of all, Ryan is the guy who created Node. That’s a pretty solid reason to start caring. Jokes aside, Deno has been under development for two years now, and its creators hope that it becomes a better version of Node. Ryan created the project to improve the stuff that Node didn’t handle quite well. And Deno is the result of these improvements.
Nonetheless, it is crucial to note that Deno is a completely different thing to Node. “It’s important to understand that Deno is not a fork of Node — it’s a completely new implementation”, in their own words.
It is also very important to take into consideration that the Deno team does explicitly not suggest that everyone should migrate their projects from Node. It might be a good choice for some applications to start doing so now, but for others not yet. We have to keep in mind, they say, that Node has been under development for more than 10 years now.
With these considerations, let’s have a look at Deno’s top features:
Security
Deno is secure by default. You need to give it explicit permission so it can access files, the network, or the environment. It is therefore much more secure than Node, which can access everything by default.
TypeScript support
TypeScript is built-in. You can write your code in modern JavaScript without having to set up anything.
Promises and async/await
Deno supports top-level await syntax, so there’s no need to deal with wrapper async functions and Node’s callback hell.
Modules
Modules are not installed but rather imported from URLs.
Deno, Dino, Deeno?
And, most importantly, how is it pronounced? Well, judging from its logo, I guess “Deeno”. But if you hear Ryan, he calls it “Deno”. Whatever.
Conclusion
So, in light of the above, should you migrate all your Node projects to Deno? Well, probably not. Is this new runtime worth having a look? Surely yes.
I hope you enjoyed the reading, and if you did, let me know in the comments! Thank you very much 👍
