10 Things I Regret About Node.js - Ryan Dahl - JSConf EU

Deno is a JavaScript runtime much like Node. For the reasons on why creating Deno I recommend "10 Things I Regret About Node" by Deno's author [1] Deno is different than Node in several aspects; most notably: - Deno supports only ES modules, there's no built-in support for CommonJS modules - Deno's APIs are all promised based - Deno does not use NPM, instead it can pull code from any URL, much like browsers do - Deno has built-in permission system that by default runs your code in full sandbox allowing to opt-in into breaking out of sandbox (eg. to read a file from disk) - As you've mention Deno can run .ts files without explicit build step - Deno comes with a full toolchain in a single binary (formatter, linter, test runner, bundler, doc generator) [1] [this video]

> ..The node_modules package resolution algorithm is how JS does namespaces.. I wonder whether they got that right through sheer genius, or by accident. I recall hearing Ryan Dahl's regrets about design decisions in Node.js, a few of which had to do with the module/package resolution algorithm. 10 Things I Regret about Node.js - [this video] There are some good aspects of it though. I like how modules/packages are just imported objects (the path resolution is a bit weird and seemingly inefficient, i.e., checking every parent folder's node_modules folder). It goes together well, that modules are also self-contained function scopes by default (I suppose a kind of anonymous namespace), that exports a plain object with assigned properties. --- Wow, I just learned about C++20 Modules, looks like a game-changing feature. [link]

If you want a couple other examples here's what I've got offhand.. Perhaps the original example, Hoare helped popularize null pointers, and then gave the "Null Pointers: The Billion Dollar Mistake" talk [link] The creator of nodejs talking about some of its mistakes: [this video] Nada Amin was part of the Scala team, and also wrote a wonderful paper about how Scala's type-system is fundamentally unsound: [link] bradfitz was a core go team member, and wrote a post about what their net.IP type got wrong [link] I have no doubt there's many more examples too, but those are the ones I can think of offhand.

> …I already have taken care of a lot of those Node issues in my own projects, there is not a ton that I see compelling in Deno. I felt this way too before using Deno for a while. So far I enjoy: - Breaking from npm/node modules support on purpose turns out to be a real plus for me. It's refreshing to have dependencies referenced by URL, and it's good to have them cached centrally by default (in $HOME/Library/Caches/deno on macOS and $XDG_CACHE_HOME/deno or $HOME/.cache/deno on Linux, for example). - Use of web platform APIs ( [link] ) and the work to standardise those across platforms ( [link] ) is encouraging. - `deno lint` and `deno fmt` make adopting and using JS/TS feel more like Rust/Go/other languages with good built-in ceremony-free tooling. - Fresh is turning into a very nice Next.js/Astro alternative ( [link] ) that I found very easy to learn and deploy, with great performance and developer experience out of the box. Bun is interesting, but I wish it didn't embrace node modules: perpetuating its use instead of attempting to move the community on by recognising it for the mistake it was feels sad to me. (See Ryan Dahl's “Design Mistakes in Node” PDF or talk for more: [link] and [this video] )

> Just because they are attempting to address it does not mean they will succeed. Strongly agree this statement , hence I don't see how switching from "npm" to "raw urls" will solve anything... The problem with Node dependency is bigger than just "npm is not a good package manager"... Honestly in this case just fork node and replace npm with something else... Here the problem relies on a mixture between poor built-in apis which are buggy a lack of vision with the language , which have been core to the language since it's origin.;. Deno doesn't seems to address those at all... Again it's just seems to be "npm is bad , and i want to use typescript natively with web apis"... I just know very well that Ryan is redoing exactly the same mistakes as Node with the same obsession he had on "EPOLL"[0] back then that will end up in a new fiasco. [0] [this video] Can't find the specific part where he mentioned "EPOLL"