Deno thoughts

I recently converted a ~150 SLOC Node project I run in AWS Lambda to Deno (https://deno.land). Deno’s been around for a year or so and seems stable at this point; especially for a 150 line hobby project. Below are some notes I wrote about my experience.

Typescript + Node require some additional steps in order to get setup. With Deno, Typescript is built in and is a first-class component in the Deno ecosystem. It’s no surprise half of the top comments in this thread titled, “Starting a Typescript Project in 2021” are recommendations for Deno. There is no “npm install …” or build scripts to add to your package.json. Install Deno, write some TS, run “deno run mycode.ts” or even “deno run –watch mycode.ts” — no need to install nodemon — and you’re set.

Deno uses the Rust-based swc TS compiler. Related Deno Issue about Switching. It is fucking fast, plain and simple. It feels like working on a Go project with respect to compile times.

The linter, formatter, and language server are all written in Rust, which, compared to their most popular Node counterparts, are wayyy faster.

All the above-mentioned tools that every Node developer ends up npm installing into every repo all come packaged with Deno’s single binary. Having everything come packaged as one binary is one of things I love about Go. Creating a .ts file for a small project without having to setup npm and install 4-5 packages is fantastic. Deno comes with a linter, formatter, REPL, language server, test runner, bundler, compiler (to ship binaries), coverage reporter, and a docs generator. You can even view docs online for any package at https://doc.deno.land.

Controversial, but one of the things I love the most about Go is that every repo on the internet looks the same. Deno’s formatter formats code using the same rules for everyone, and I think that’s pretty great.

The Deno community has put together a list of packages modeled after the Go stdlib. Deno stdlib. I love this. It means no more searching github for packages or wondering what the latest web framework you’re supposed to be using is. The http package is a great example.