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Deno raises $21M

deno.com

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Re: Deno raises $21M

#291

Post by erikpukinskis »

wokwokwok wrote: post #227
nilsbunger wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd spawn a new DB for that instance too. It can still go a long way to give you a look at how your application worked in the past.

Am I mistaken in thinking that’s totally ridiculous? Let’s charitably say you can run your app with a 1GB cut down snapshot of production. You’re going to do what, save a snapshot of the database for every commit? Every schema migration? …and then provision that up in a running database server… which is notoriously not container friendly… ? It doesn’t sound very plausible to me. Our database is ~1TB, and the app runs…

What do you need production data for?

Just fire up a fresh DB with some sensible default fixtures.

Or pause an integration test mid-way.

Or call some factories from the REPL.

The last thing in the world I want to do development with is production data. Production data is the data of last resort when nothing else can repro.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#292

Post by brabel »

pier25 wrote: post #290
vcryan wrote: post #188

Deno overstates the problem it is intended to solve because its founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer-famous. Let's say a company were to adopt this tech over Node, well, it seems like it would be slightly better, but probably not much of a game-changer. I'll leave it to y'all to talk about what tech is truly interesting as I don't want to seem ideological/biased, I just don't see how Deno i…

Maybe not the tech, but consider the vision. Deno is working on the runtime, the cloud infrastructure, the dx, and a framework (fresh). Nobody is doing that afaik. I think this is where the value lies.

Sounds like Dark to me: https://darklang.com/

Re: Deno raises $21M

#293

Post by nl »

scarface74 wrote: post #206
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #15

> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […] This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again?

Virtual machines are still the abstraction. Each Lambda/Fargate (serverless Docker) runs in its own VM.

Lambda and most similar technologies use variants of containers, not VMs.

Outside HN that distinction might not be important. Here being pedantically correct does matter on this because the VM abstraction has been around for a long time, whereas containers were an enabling technology for serverless.

And containers and the fast startup, security and resource consumption guarantees they offer is a big difference to the old days of shared PHP hosting.

And this is why "reinvention" with new technology is different.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#294

Post by erikpukinskis »

int_19h wrote: post #273
spencerchubb wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deno is only possible because V8 is so hyper-optimized. If you think about it, V8 has to compile/interpret and then run javascript code on the fly after downloading it in the browser. That's how good V8 is. That puts javascript in a unique position to enable something like Deno So if there was a compiler/interpreter for another language that was close to being as good as V8, then something like this could exist for o…

There are many compiled languages that produce more performant code than V8. As you noted yourself yourself, V8 has time constraints - it must be able to compile and run the code "fast enough" for a web page to load. This limits the extent of optimizations that it can perform.

And for the handful of routines where all-out performance is the bottleneck for your business those languages are the right tool for the job.

For everything else, there’s JavaScript.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#295

Post by nl »

brundolf wrote: post #198
digitxpc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

And the performance argument isn't even just about CPU time, right? The fact that JS is heavily event-friendly, and all of its IO APIs are non-blocking by default, gives it an automatic advantage over busy-waiting languages like Python, and also languages where concurrency means writing threads manually. If your web server spends most of its time on IO (network, DB, file system), as many do, JS acts as a lightweight…

You have to work pretty hard to make Python (or any other language with reasonable web frameworks) busy-wait!

Blocking is NOT the same as busy wait.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#296

Post by pier25 »

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.

Workers are not meant as a generalist runtime.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#297

Post by lmm »

nickjj wrote: post #217

From the post: > For example, it is integrated with GitHub in such a way that on every push it will provision a new server running specifically that code, deployed to the edge, worldwide, and persisted permanently. Want to access the code your app was running a month ago at commit f7c5e19? It will be served up instantly at a moment's notice. It costs you nothing to have that bit of JavaScript responding to requests i…

> The post mentions "The open source Deno runtime shows how clean and productive a modern, batteries-included, programming environment can be" so it sounds like they expect you'll be running database backed apps and not only static sites.

It suggests you'll be running a datastore, not necessarily an SQL database (the most overrated technology in existence IMO, especially for web apps where essentially none of its strong points are relevant). Storing old data as-is and migrating on read is definitely doable, and you can keep backwards compatibility to day 1 that way relatively easily. I worked on a system much like the one from "An oral history of Bank Python" that did exactly that, and had been doing so on a large scale for around a decade. Having a better-integrated datastore that can present multiple views of the same data is another way to achieve that, if you want to keep the migration out of the "application" code.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#298

Post by nl »

javajosh wrote: post #269
hombre_fatal wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they asked why someone would use JS if there were other options, and I'm saying that I don't think Ruby nor Python are better languages than JS. Part of that is due to their bolt-on async vs JS async everything, part of that is due to TS, but there's more. For example, you bring up Python's collection comprehensions, but I could easily point out Python's gimped lambda support and thus poor FP abstractions and t…

>you can't say something is the best. You can. And you did. When you say something is your favorite, this is like saying it is the best, all things being equal, in your view. For network connected server processes, I say the jvm is the best runtime. Redbean, interestingly enough, may take that crown, but I'm only now playing with it, but I love its tiny simplicity. In some ways this is like love - do you shy away fro…

Arguing that there is no objective way to measure "the best" and the saying an opinion as an opinion is not the same thing.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#299

Post by neya »

alephnan wrote: post #253
neya wrote: post #248

> JavaScript is unlike other programming languages in that it is the universal scripting language. Its universality combined with security from the browser and its raw performance lends itself to a solution for these problems, at least for a certain common class of applications. You want to sell Javascript based solutions, go for it. But don’t push this nonsense like “No language like Javascript”. The only reason Jav…

> Doesn’t make it the best because of that reason. This is a strawman. Where in the original post did they say JavaScript was the best. They said JavaScript is the "universal" scripting language in the sense that is ubiquitous. That is fact. You literally confirmed it here: > Javascript has a wider adoption than others is because it’s forced upon us > You know what usually bites me when I touch code that has not been…

> I say this as an experience software engineer deploying a wide array of web apps getting hundreds of millions of views a month over my career across FANG companies.

> Okay....? Then write VanillaJS instead of depending on Node dependencies. It's not JavaScript's fault that you're a contractor dealing with other developers' app-level tech debt.

That’s a strawman. I challenge you to write a full on production level frontend application using pure Vanilla JS. You can’t. Not in 2022…unless it’s a simple DOM manipulation job.

> That's a cool story, but Deno uses TypeScript so the whole JavaScript rant crumbles here

“Bits like this make me feel like you're just throwing a bunch of domain-related words together and hopes something sticks.” See how easy it is to resort to ad-hominem?

So what you’ve worked across FANG companies? It’s irrelevant to the discussion. No need to show off - saying you’re an experienced software engineer is good enough. The rest of it doesn’t make your argument any more valid.

Javascript apologists like you who don’t see the problem with the ecosystem are the reason why the whole ecosystem is so fucked up with half baked systems that are barely reliable.

Re: Deno raises $21M

#300

Post by erikpukinskis »

vcryan wrote: post #188

Deno overstates the problem it is intended to solve because its founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer-famous. Let's say a company were to adopt this tech over Node, well, it seems like it would be slightly better, but probably not much of a game-changer. I'll leave it to y'all to talk about what tech is truly interesting as I don't want to seem ideological/biased, I just don't see how Deno i…

> I just don't see how Deno is particularly notable.

I think the place they can really sell me is:

- source maps

- debugging

It’s an absolutely PITA to get those two things working across a JavaScript stack. There are so many runtime contexts to deal with:

1) the browser

2) your API server

3) your frontend test env

4) your API server test env

5) browser and backend for your end to end/integration tests

6) pre-packaged code from secondary repos you are importing into all of the above

7) All of the above in CI

8) Special production builds of much of the above

It’s truly a nightmare. I’ve been trying to set up a fresh JavaScript full stack and it’s so much work. Every step of the way I need to take days off to do deep research into how to set this stuff up.

And it starts to make sense why no company I’ve ever worked at had all of that stuff working. You just deal with wrong stack traces and use console.log instead of a debugger in the places where it doesn’t work.

If Deno can provide all of those runtimes in an integrated way, with debugging and source maps working automatically that’s a total game changer.

And I’m honestly not sure who else could do it. Maybe like Next/Nuxt and all them? But do those projects handle build/packaging across multiple repos? I don’t think so…

Deno can nail that because they own packaging, and they can just skip the whole build/sourcemap step entirely and just distribute .ts files.

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