So What Exactly Is Deno

A New Contributor’s Perspective

Deno pushed out it’s first major release a not too long ago generating quite a few hot-takes. This isn’t going to be a hot-take but a look at what Deno is, where is it at right now and where it could go from a new contributor’s to perspective.

So the first question here would be what the heck is Deno?

The short answer; it’s a relatively small general-purpose runtime environment for JavaScript with first class support for promise based interfaces, ECMAScript modules and seamless TypeScript integration started by the same Ryan Dahl that authored Node.js.

Now, I wouldn’t go as far as saying that history is repeating itself, but there’s definitively a sense of dejavu here.

Ryan presented Node.js sometime back in ~2009. Which at the time was a fairly rough unpolished but neat little JavaScript runtime with a basic event driven input/output interface.

Fast forward to ~2019, Ryan presents Deno, a fairly rough unpolished but neat little JavaScript/TypeScript runtime with…