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Deno raises $21M

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Re: Deno raises $21M

#111

Post by mmcnl »

flohofwoe wrote: post #101
vlunkr wrote: post #69

This question is going to make me sound like a jerk, but why do you want to write your back-end in JS? Deno looks like a great improvement over node.js, but I don't feel compelled to use it. It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like…

I may be the odd one out, but for me node.js (and hopefully in the future Deno) isn't about the backend, but instead it's a pretty nice scripting environment for tooling and automation. I've been using mainly Python for this in the past, but got burned out quite a bit by the python2=>3 transition. (but still: don't underestimate the raw performance of V8, for many things it's definitely good enough)

I completely understand what you're saying, but Python is a lot better now. You don't have to worry about Python 2 anymore and the tooling is a lot better as well (Black, Flake8, Poetry are all really nice).

Re: Deno raises $21M

#112

Post by IshKebab »

brundolf wrote: post #78
password4321 wrote: post #5

+ People get paid, hopefully a few even get big $. - Investors want unicorn returns. Good luck!

What is their actual business model? I know there's Deno Deploy, and presumably they offer some kind of enterprise-support type deal. But the first is easily copied by competitors (in an already-crowded market), and the other isn't super lucrative. Is there anything else? I love Deno and want it to succeed, but it doesn't feel like a unicorn, and I'm worried about it being expected to become one

I feel like they have a better business plan than NPM did at least. They'll probably get acquired by one of the big cloud players.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#113

Post by digitxpc »

vlunkr wrote: post #69

This question is going to make me sound like a jerk, but why do you want to write your back-end in JS? Deno looks like a great improvement over node.js, but I don't feel compelled to use it. It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like…

I've written up an at-scale production backend in Node.js and can very much stand by the decision to use Node over Elixir or Go (which I was considering at the time). I think fundamentally, the power of a JS-based backend is its pragmatism--it's not the best at most things, but it comes very close to it in so many categories that it's a safe option for a lot of use cases.

> It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back-end options, and even older choices like Ruby and Python have continued to improve.

I'd agree that Node.js performance is generally not the best reason to be writing a backend in it since a static language will often yield better performance, but for the amount of dynamic power you get, it's extremely performant by default[1]. The next most performant dynamic language for I/O is, like you said, probably Erlang/Elixir, but V8 is generally understood to have better CPU-bound performance than BEAM.

[1]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

> Seems like the standard arguments would be that developers already know JS, and that you can share code with the browser. I don't find these highly compelling.

I've found that developers already knowing JS is a very practical reason, if not ideological. I'm in a team with a lot of generalists who like to work full-stack, and being able to use the same mental models and syntax is a lot of cognitive load lifted off our shoulders. It also doubles the hiring pool of people who can hit the ground running on the backend, because now anyone who has experience with JS on the frontend can jump over to the backend with relatively little training.

The other key reason for a backend in JS is that the community is extremely large, which means that a lot of the troubleshooting I'd have to do in languages with smaller communities is done for me by someone who was kind enough to post a workaround online. This saves me a lot of time and energy, as does the plethora of packages.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#114

Post by jhgg »

mattlondon wrote: post #87
jhgg wrote: post #23

Deno deploy seems cool and all, but I haven't seen any great rationale for using their service over say Cloudflare Workers.

You could say the same about AWS Azure, and GCP. Competition is good.

Competition is great - sure, but I want to know what Deno gives me over its competitors.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#115

Post by wdb »

jitl wrote: post #64
capableweb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from the rest of your message, I thought you wanted to get up to speed on that `fetch` is now available in nodejs core since version 17 or something like that (think it got included early this year).

I think this requires the `--experimental-fetch` command-line argument (per https://nodejs.org/tr/blog/release/v17.5.0/ ), so I don't think it qualifies as "by default".

Yeah, but you could use `undici`-package for older Node version as it is being used to provide this experimental Fetch in Node 17+

Re: Deno raises $21M

#116

Post by eyberg »

I don't know if marketing was involved with using the term 'isolate' or not but if they are isolates as described by companies such as Cloudflare and Google, it might help to speak a bit more about the actual implementation at the infrastructure level.

Isolates are a really interesting approach to deal with the inherent nature of scripting languages to deal with the lack of threads as most scripting languages are inherently single-thread/single-process. If you have a 2000 line ruby class named 'Dog' you can easily overwrite it with the number 42. This is awesome on one hand, however it makes scaling the vm through the use of threads too difficult as threads will share the heap and then you have to put mutexes on everything removing any performance gain you would have normally gotten. Instead the end-user has to pre-fork a ton of app vms with their own large memory consumption, their own network connections, etc and stick it behind a load balancer which is not ideal to their compiled, statically typed cousins and frankly I just don't see the future allowing these languages as we continuously march towards larger and large core count systems. I'd personally like to see more of the scripting languages adopt this construct as it addresses a really hard problem these types of languages have to deal with and makes scaling them a lot easier. To this note - if you are working on this in any of the scripting languages please let me know because it's something I'd like to help push forward.

Having said that, they should never be considered as a multi-tenant (N customers) isolation 'security' barrier. They are there for scaling not security.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#117

Post by ushakov »

mrkurt wrote: post #70
bowsamic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. Do you think that investors see every company that isn't a unicorn as "nothing"? I think you're living in a fairytale

They do, but that's not a bad thing. Sequoia invests in companies they think could be worth multiple billions. If Deno reaches 30% of the impact of Node, their company could be worth billions. In the meantime, we get a better open source runtime because they have money to build it out.

a startup could be worth billions only based on the fact that investors continue throwing money at it

there are lots of companies, which are technically "unicorns", but haven't even got any revenue yet (Rivian and Nikola come to mind)

Re: Deno raises $21M

#118

Post by ricardonunez »

tambourine_man wrote: post #61
potamic wrote: post #33

Interesting how this will play out. It's an ambitious goal to consolidate client side and server side javascript ecosystems which is quite fragmented today. On the other hand, this may only increase fragmentation further by introducing another target to develop for (wait for transpilers that can automagically convert between deno and node code). I will always look at javascript as this problem kid that cannot get its…

https://xkcd.com/927/

I knew that xkcd before I even clicked. They should update it and increase the number dramatically.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#119

Post by lmeyerov »

bowsamic wrote: post #98
crsv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a venture capitalist, this is in fact the model.

If they’re expecting a unicorn why are they funding Deno?

VCs see a tiny chance that it can be a 100X return. So raising $20M at say a $50-100M valuation now, that means betting on a $5B+ exit. In return for getting money to take a shot at that level of artificially-fueled revenue growth, the founders are willing to cede control of the community to professional financiers. As others wrote, that's the VC model: make a ton of these bets, and as long as 2-4 turn out, the lottery winners pay for the bankruptcies.

Given every big company uses JS, and thus many SaaS VCs have JS in their annual set of thesis bets, it's reasonable that Deno got picked by a top group given their team & growth. Same story with npm, netlify, etc.

I wish the team luck in hitting significant revenue in the next 9-12mo, as that will determine a lot of what happens to the community. A lot of pressure & culture change to work through!

Re: Deno raises $21M

#120

Post by wperron »

nikanj wrote: post #20
qweqwerwerwerwr wrote: post #12

are there real-world, commercial products actually running on """serverless""" architecture? no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and easier with regular tools

Hot take: investors really are stupid enough to think ”servers/datacenters are a massive cost for large companies. A serverless solution should save them lots of money”

It's not a hot take, it's just a bad take, and a complete failure to understand the value proposition of these types of offerings (and why we're seeing so many of them pop up these days)
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