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Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#31

Post by diggan »

jgalt212 wrote: post #17
diggan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know of a server-side typescript scripting engine that is not trying to be backwards compatible with node? What's the point? If you're in love with static types, but have to do JavaScript because you're targeting the browser, I kind of understand why'd you go for TypeScript. But if you're on the backend, and don't need anything JS, why limit yourself to TypeScript which is a "Compile-to-JS" language? Yo…

maybe because async Python is painful, an async TypeScript / JS is the default.

Use another language where async isn't painful then? Since it's the backend, you have 100% control over what stack to chose, unless some other requirement gets in the way. And no, async isn't "the default" in at least JavaScript, not sure where you'd get that from.

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#32

Post by lolinder »

afavour wrote: post #7

I’m sure a bunch of the criticism of Deno is exaggerated. But there’s something fundamental holding me back from investing my time in Deno, or Bun for that matter: they’re both VC funded. The post is a good illustration of why that matters. Very little of it is about Deno itself, instead it’s mostly about the paid-for services Deno Inc offers. They have to prioritise and chase that because their investors want to see…

Yep. Honestly, the pivot to Node/NPM compatibility was the moment I lost interest in Deno. I know why they did it, and as you say from a financial perspective it makes complete sense, but they had the chance to be a fresh start to the whole ecosystem and they gave that up.

I really like coding in TypeScript and think that most of people's irritation with JavaScript isn't actually related to the language so much as the ecosystem of NPM. The exponentially growing web of dependencies and the constant churn of deprecations are exhausting, detracting from a core language that is now pretty solid.

Deno set out to change that and be something new, but they squandered that chance because it was too risky for their investors. And again, that's totally fair—resetting an ecosystem is risky and probably wouldn't have yielded the return they needed! But giving up on that was giving up on what made Deno different and interesting. If I'm going to use NPM anyway why not stick with Node while I'm at it?

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#33

Post by coolcase »

lolinder wrote: post #29
diggan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know of a server-side typescript scripting engine that is not trying to be backwards compatible with node? What's the point? If you're in love with static types, but have to do JavaScript because you're targeting the browser, I kind of understand why'd you go for TypeScript. But if you're on the backend, and don't need anything JS, why limit yourself to TypeScript which is a "Compile-to-JS" language? Yo…

Because out of all the languages that stand a chance of being adopted at most workplaces, TypeScript is in my opinion the single most enjoyable to code in. It has an extremely expressive type system that gets out of your way and allows you to model almost anything you can come up with, it has great IDE integrations on both VS Code and JetBrains, it has strong first-class support for functional programming patterns. O…

I'm torn between Go (nicer runtime) and Node (get to use TS for nicer types!)

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#35

Post by user3939382 »

mattlondon wrote: post #6

I was super-excited about Deno right up until they threw away their earlier commitments and added backwards compatibility for node and all the shite that comes with it. The whole selling point for me was that deno was node without the bullshit and baggage, but they dropped that and basically just turned it into node with built in typescript support and a few other minor things like the permissions. Similar story with…

I like JSDoc. Doesn’t have anything to do with Node and you get many of the same benefits without all the compilation toolchain complexity.

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#36

Post by hyperpape »

mattlondon wrote: post #6

I was super-excited about Deno right up until they threw away their earlier commitments and added backwards compatibility for node and all the shite that comes with it. The whole selling point for me was that deno was node without the bullshit and baggage, but they dropped that and basically just turned it into node with built in typescript support and a few other minor things like the permissions. Similar story with…

> Does anyone know of a server-side typescript scripting engine that is not trying to be backwards compatible with node?

I'm sure you can find other projects that are going to fail, but why do you want to?

Node has lots of problems (I am basing this statement on the fact that it's a major tech project). None of them are sufficient to prevent it from being extremely widely used.

To fix those problems in a product that will be used, it is not sufficient to provide something sort of like Node but without those problems. You either have to:

1. Provide a tool that requires a major migration, but has some incredible upside. This can attract greenfield projects, and sometimes edge out the existing tool.

2. Provide a tool with minimal migration cost, and without the same problems. Maybe this tool can replace the existing one. Ideally there will be other carrots (performance, reliability, ease of use). Such a tool can get people to migrate if there are enough carrots, and the migration cost is low enough.

Deno was a classic example of messing this up. It's not #1 or #2, it has the worst of both worlds. The upside was that it did things "the right way", and the downside was that you couldn't run most code that worked on Node. This is the kind of approach that only attracts zealots and hobbyists.

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#37

Post by koakuma-chan »

diggan wrote: post #28
koakuma-chan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I'd chose Clojure for anything I have a choice with. And then you would have to solve the problem of how to communicate with the client.

I dunno, HTTP works pretty well for me as a transport layer to communicate with clients. Otherwise Websockets. Not sure why you'd think that be a difficult thing?

> Not sure why you'd think that be a difficult thing?

You aren't suggesting to handwrite an HTTP API client, right? You would have to set up either OpenAPI which is a mess, or GraphQL which is also a mess. LMK if you have a better solution.

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#38

Post by coolcase »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #20
diggan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know of a server-side typescript scripting engine that is not trying to be backwards compatible with node? What's the point? If you're in love with static types, but have to do JavaScript because you're targeting the browser, I kind of understand why'd you go for TypeScript. But if you're on the backend, and don't need anything JS, why limit yourself to TypeScript which is a "Compile-to-JS" language? Yo…

Why would you use something other than a JS framework to build a web app back-end? You don't have to deal with OpenAPI or GraphQL, you can just use server actions.

You don't need to deal with those anyway. RPC it. fetch one one end, route on other.

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#39

Post by LoganDark »

diggan wrote: post #24
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why limit yourself to TypeScript which is a "Compile-to-JS" language? You control the stack, make another choice. Because some of us _like_ typescript, or at a minimum, have invested a significant portion of our careers learning ts/js. We want an ROI, we just don't want node/npm.

> Because some of us _like_ typescript, or at a minimum, have invested a significant portion of our careers learning ts/js. Right, makes sense. It also makes sense that most of those learnings are transferable, it's not like TypeScript is the only language with types. So your design/architecture skills can be used elsewhere too. Locking yourself into the ecosystem of one language, then asking other runtimes to adhere…

I haven't seen any true competition with TypeScript, at least for me. Go is unsound (Go slices...), Python is too high-level (even with mypyc), Rust is too low-level (in comparison to TS), and so on. It's not just "a language with types".

Also, when I was writing a frontend and backend both in TS, I could literally share the exact same type definitions between them. Then I could use a compiler plugin (`typescript-is`) to validate on the server that payloads match the appropriate type. It was amazing and worked quite well, and I can't really see that being nearly as easy and seamless with anything else.

Re: Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

#40

Post by skydhash »

lolinder wrote: post #32
afavour wrote: post #7

I’m sure a bunch of the criticism of Deno is exaggerated. But there’s something fundamental holding me back from investing my time in Deno, or Bun for that matter: they’re both VC funded. The post is a good illustration of why that matters. Very little of it is about Deno itself, instead it’s mostly about the paid-for services Deno Inc offers. They have to prioritise and chase that because their investors want to see…

Yep. Honestly, the pivot to Node/NPM compatibility was the moment I lost interest in Deno. I know why they did it, and as you say from a financial perspective it makes complete sense, but they had the chance to be a fresh start to the whole ecosystem and they gave that up. I really like coding in TypeScript and think that most of people's irritation with JavaScript isn't actually related to the language so much as th…

Yeah. JavaScript is fine if you’re dealing with the DOM and vendor libraries, or if you’re using it in some scripting environment like GNOME. Node were ok too, but failed to develop a standard library like Go or Python. Addressing that failure would go a long way towards a better JS ecosystem.
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