21 ms·

Deno raises $21M

608 points by 0xedb 4y ago

haolez 4y ago
I think it's a good opportunity for Meteor, which is a very interesting framework but with some technical debt, to jump ship on Deno and start fresh again. Maybe they could try replacing their in-house synchronization mechanisms by managed services such as AppSync. Randomly wondering :)
kirankp89 4y ago
I’ve never been interested in JS as I mostly work in C++ but the ease of install/use of Deno over Node made me actually want to try it. It’s nice to have access to a bunch of web tech with a single binary. Very excited to see where this project goes!
mmastrac 4y ago
I played with an early version of Deno a few years back and it was already way more comfortable to use than node. It's a real counterexample to second-system syndrome. The only reason I didn't continue was a lack of ARM support.
- zackangelo 4y ago
  Surprised this is the case because I use their Rust v8 bindings on an ARM laptop almost every day. Have you tried building it from source?
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    It was a few years back and I was mainly playing with a few early projects. I was very productive, but wanted to target my Raspberry Pi and it just wasn't there. I ended up going 100% rust instead.
    - mattlondon 4y ago
      There are still no RPi builds as far as I am aware, which is a shame as there are now Mac silicon builds so not sure what the hold up is. I do wonder if there are.more Raspberry Pi's out there than M1/M2 Macs :) Someone is doing the builds here - been using them and seem ok: https://github.com/LukeChannings/deno-arm64 https://github.com/LukeChannings/deno-arm64
      - crowlKats 4y ago
        The M1 builds are made manually by us, as github doesnt provide any runners. the same problem does apply for linux arm, however we don't have any arm linux systems any one of the members use; and building on a pi is a no-go, as that can take 70+ minutes, so that would make our release cycle a lot more complicated. Either way, we are investigating potential possibilities besides waiting for github to have runners available
        pcl 4y ago
        Have you tried building in a rpi virtual machine on a Mac? I have no idea what the performance would look like, but it’d be easy enough to try, especially since you are already managing your own max builders. I want to say I followed these instructions for doing so recently: https://gist.github.com/plembo/c4920016312f058209f5765cb9a3a25e https://gist.github.com/plembo/c4920016312f058209f5765cb9a3a...
- beaker52 4y ago
  What made it "way more comfortable" for you?
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I had a very different experience. I very much wanted to make it work, but trying to use it with existing npm packages and import maps was incredibly painful, and I ultimately switched over to node for that project.
  - toastercat 4y ago
    Haven't tried import maps, but so long as the npm package uses ES Modules and doesn't rely on Node specific APIs, you should be good to go.
msoad 4y ago
Running little processes on the server without the VM/K8s expensive abstraction has a lot of potential. I'm sure Deno will do great! At least this way of deploying web apps has a lot of potential.
- whatever1 4y ago
  Isn’t this what an operating system is doing by default?
  - msoad 4y ago
    I should say "untrusted code" to be more specific.
femiagbabiaka 4y ago
Are there any sources for the claims made in the chart on the second half of the page or are they theoretical? Seems really cool in theory!
password4321 4y ago
+ People get paid, hopefully a few even get big $. - Investors want unicorn returns. Good luck!
- bowsamic 4y ago
  I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC
  - nikanj 4y ago
    You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. They will force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or kill the company trying
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      > 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
      - mrkurt 4y ago
        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.
        ushakov 4y ago
        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)
      - 4y ago
blocked_again 4y ago
Is Deno going to be the first runtime environment to IPO?
- vaishnavsm 4y ago
  I think Sun Microsystems IPOd
  - andruby 4y ago
    Were they not making & selling hardware at the time of IPO?
jhgg 4y ago
Deno deploy seems cool and all, but I haven't seen any great rationale for using their service over say Cloudflare Workers.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  Yeah unless I'm missing something isn't this just a stand alone company offering roughly workers?
  - mrkurt 4y ago
    This is an open source JavaScript runtime with a hosted business model. Deno is great. Deno Deploy is a reasonable way for them to make money.
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      Meanwhile, Cloudflare says they are open sourcing Cloudflare Workers runtime: https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081 https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081
    - threatofrain 4y ago
      CloudFlare workers is on my radar because of an ecology of other "edge" products that are in the works or already released. That's what Deno would need to catchup on to be on the table for discussion for me. Otherwise it remains a toy I use in my spare time (which I do enjoy at the moment).
- mattlondon 4y ago
  You could say the same about AWS Azure, and GCP. Competition is good.
  - jhgg 4y ago
    Competition is great - sure, but I want to know what Deno gives me over its competitors.
Zababa 4y ago
> Cold start (time to first response, ms) O(100) O(1000) O(10000) I think ~100 ~1000 ~10000 would be clearer than using the big O notation, since this has nothing to do with fuinctions.
- vaishnavsm 4y ago
  Agreed! I'm pretty sure they're just using O(x) to mean on the order of x, since big O of any constant is the same (unless that's their point??? :O)
- laputan_machine 4y ago
  I genuinely don't even understand it. I was either taught wrong, learned wrong or this doesn't make sense. O(100) is constant time, so it's no different to saying O(1) or whatever, I've only ever used O to talk about how we care about the time complexity of a function, e.g. comparing linear time to quadratic time. 1 is the same as 100, irrelevant.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  If it’s big O notation, it makes no sense because O(10000)=O(1000)=O(100)=O(1).
  - koshergweilo 4y ago
    I think they're trying to communicate that those are worst case latency numbers. You're correct in that formal use of Big O notation doesn't distinguish constants.
- csmpltn 4y ago
  It's that easy to raise money these days, at the 10% inflation mark. Spin up a webpage full of nonsense promises and they'll come chasing after you to take their cash.
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  I'm not sure, I'm pretty sure they're trying to communicate that these are worst case estimates. ~100 seems like it's communicating average case estimates (big theta notation), which isn't really the same thing
caust1c 4y ago
The color changing on this page gives me a migraine: https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy I like Deno in principle, but I'd love to see how Slack, Github and Netlify are using it.
- cloudyglider 4y ago
  Weird... it's having the same affect on me, something about slowly fading to white background is making me flinch. Is this a known phenomenon?
  - airstrike 4y ago
    As a second data point, I added the same effect to my blog back in, I don’t know, 2002 and all my friends complained about getting a headache as well, so I turned it off For some reason it never had that same negative effect on me
  - yccs27 4y ago
    I suspect that it basically confuses your brain because it tries to adjust the "white balance" so that the background becomes normal white. But the background is just saturated enough and changing so quickly that it just can't follow.
- asdfasdfdsfa 4y ago
  - caust1c 4y ago
    Yeah I love making prospective customers feel pain too. /s
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      The world doesn’t exist to cater to your weird specific thing that gives you a headache
qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago
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
- nikanj 4y ago
  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”
  - wperron 4y ago
    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)
- lghh 4y ago
  > are there real-world, commercial products actually running on """serverless""" architecture? Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I have worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%. > 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 Considering you have to ask if there are _any_ products running in a serverless environment, I would imagine you need more exposure to the concept before you make such a large judgement on it.
  - qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago
    what was the product and the scale then?
    - lghh 4y ago
      I'd rather not list my last two companies or their scale, but I can assure you they are real companies that exist, have users, and make money. I'm not sure why I even would be asked to.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
> 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?
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  It’s amusing to see a whole generation of senior developers (“senior” as in 5+ years of experience) that haven’t experienced web development without React[0] and who proceed to reinvent PHP/ASP.NET/RoR. [0] Used here as shorthand for “modern js driven development”
  - efdee 4y ago
    We could really do without this kind of snark here. Not only is it condescending, but it's also just plain wrong, either on purpose or due to the writer not being familiar with the subject at hand.
  - dntrkv 4y ago
    Such a tiring take... Nobody is reinventing PHP or RoR development. What is happening is the community taking all our favorite parts of these stacks and combining and implementing them in ways that facilitate a dev experience that we could only have dreamed of back in the PHP/RoR days. - Senior dev that started off in the PHP and then RoR days
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Yep totally agree with this. - Engineering Lead who got his start in PHP/ASP(pre .net) and loves the modern ecosystem despite its flaws
    - manigandham 4y ago
      Back in RoR days? It's still here with new releases offering modern features. ASP.NET is even more cutting edge.
  - jacobr 4y ago
spicyusername 4y ago
Is the intent of this product to compete with something like Netlify?
- crowlKats 4y ago
  No, Netlify actually uses Deno to some degree: https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-with-edge-functions/ https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-w...
  - spicyusername 4y ago
    Right, but the $21M of funding seems to be for Deno Deploy, the product, not Deno, the CLI.
    - crowlKats 4y ago
      The wording in that blogpost might be a bit off, here it is more in-depth: https://deno.com/blog/netlify-edge-functions-on-deno-deploy https://deno.com/blog/netlify-edge-functions-on-deno-deploy Netlify is using Deploy
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
What does O(100) mean in the comparison table?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  I think they are using O(x) as a shorthand for antilog10(log10(x)±0.5). Or, in simpler terms, O(x) = “approximately x, to one significant figure”
- sfink 4y ago
  "on the order of 100ms" It's misusing big-O notation for "order of magnitude", but after I initially tripped over it, it seemed clear enough.
- selljamhere 4y ago
  It’s used as a comparison to the alternative, O(1000), an order-of-magnitude improvement.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sergiotapia 4y ago
Where's the angle for the investors - what will Deno do to produce the returns necessary for such a high amount? I thought Deno would be the eradication of Node and bring stability to Javascript. From the outside it seems to be firmly on it's way to being just another Zeit/Vercel. :(
potamic 4y ago
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 shit together in life, perpetually chasing the romance of utopia.
- jitl 4y ago
  There is already a system for building a NPM node package from a Deno package, called dnt (deno to node). It's maintained by some Deno team members. Here's a blog post they wrote about porting "Oak" (a deno HTTP server framework) to Node: https://deno.com/blog/dnt-oak https://deno.com/blog/dnt-oak The nice thing about Deno conceptually, is that it's much more similar to the browser platform than node is. It uses ES6 only, has things like `fetch` built-in by default, and generally follows browser standards around interfaces like Request, Response, etc. Instead of needing a complicated build process to make Node code work on the browser, now we have a complicated build process to make Deno/Browser code work on Node. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - capableweb 4y ago
    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).
    - jitl 4y ago
      I think this requires the `--experimental-fetch` command-line argument (per https://nodejs.org/tr/blog/release/v17.5.0/ https://nodejs.org/tr/blog/release/v17.5.0/), so I don't think it qualifies as "by default".
      - wging 4y ago
        That's an old blog post; the current release is 18.4.0, which supports `fetch` without a command-line argument. You do get this warning the first time it's invoked, though: (node:340760) ExperimentalWarning: The Fetch API is an experimental feature. This feature could change at any time (Use `node --trace-warnings ...` to show where the warning was created) (some later blog posts that mention fetch being enabled-by-default and in the global scope are https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/v18-release-announce/ https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/v18-release-announc... and https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v18.0.0/ https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v18.0.0/)
loftsy 4y ago
An "isolate cloud" is exactly how Google App Engine worked 10 years ago. It was a good idea then and is still a good idea now.
pcj-github 4y ago
Comments are a bit negative. I for one think they are onto something here. Surprised it's only 21M. I would have expected in these market conditions to beef up more for the next 2-3 years.
- vincentmarle 4y ago
  > Surprised it's only 21M. Indeed, especially when you compare with a company such as Supabase (which is working on way less interesting technology imho) who just raised $80M: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31328783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31328783
  - mrkurt 4y ago
    Deno probably would have raised $80M if they'd raised the same time Supabase did. Investors got quite a bit more tight fisted between January and April.
    - chucky123 4y ago
      Good point.
dirtyaura 4y ago
Can someone more knowledgeable highlight what kind of security model do these Deno deployments have compared to virtual machines and containers, if they are isolated at the process level.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Johannesbourg 4y ago
Somebody doesn't understand O notation.
- pdpi 4y ago
  They're abusing the notation, but doing so in a way that's perfectly clear.
- m00dy 4y ago
  I also didn't get it. so I think in their notaion O(10) has greater magnitude than (>) O(1)
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    You're expected to read it out loud (in English), where one of the conventional readings of O(f) is "order of f". Conveniently "order of 100" is usually taken to mean not asymptotic behavior bounded by a constant multiple of 100, but a range within an order of magnitude or so of 100. Which is to say, they're saying Deno has a cold start time of ~100 ms, package size ~10M, a physical machine can support ~1k instances.
    - m00dy 4y ago
      cool, it is good to know but, at the same time, it is weird. I would use x convention to deliver that message. That comparison table is there for a reason and that is to deliver a marketing message. I'm sure there could be some better ways to deliver that message.
vlunkr 4y ago
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 Ruby and Python have continued to improve. 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. EDIT: I haven't learned typescript yet, based on the replies, it seems like that could be a good reason to choose it. Seems like a nice middle-ground between typical scripting and compiled languages.
- timmg 4y ago
  You're kinda stuck writing JS on the frontend. The (only) advantage of also using it on the backend is that you can share code. In some cases, I could see that being compelling. FWIW, I think Typescript would make an even stronger case. And I think(?) that's one thing Deno is trying to do.
  - pmoleri 4y ago
    Sharing code is great, I've moved processing between backend and front-end or even share the same code in both. Makes SSR+SPA possible using the same code. Typescript is a must for me, but I don't need Deno for that. I haven't used beyond scripting but for the time being I don't see a mayor benefit over node or ts-node other than easier/zero project setup.
- mrkurt 4y ago
  I like TypeScript and would like to write backends in TypeScript. I'm coming around on Elixir. I never want to write Go that interacts with a database again. Rust seems complicated. I don't think I'm smart or committed enough to get anywhere with rust.
  - kbd 4y ago
    > I never want to write Go that interacts with a database again. Why? I’ve been using sqlx and it seems fine.
pseudosavant 4y ago
As a Deno fan I was surprised to learn that the free tier for Deno Deploy includes 100k requests per day and 100GB of bandwidth monthly. I know I'll be trying it out now.
- benatkin 4y ago
  I think Deno Deploy and using Deno on fly.io could be a powerful combo. Deno has some advantages that definitely lend themselves to having control of your entire MicroVMs. An app could easily be split between serverless-friendly and non-serverless-friendly parts of the stack by using both together.
- mkroman 4y ago
  > Up to 10ms CPU time per request So less than 17 minutes of CPU time per day - not a lot, but also not nothing.. But at 10ms per request, what would one use it for? Just server-side rendering for something simple?
  - crowlKats 4y ago
    proper applications as well. example is the https://deno.land https://deno.land website has an average CPU time of 6ms. CPU time means it doesnt include any IO bound operations, so ie doing a fetch request wont really contribute to the CPU time.
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      Average time 6ms with hard cap at 10ms sounds like a ticking timebomb you don't dare to put in production. I've had to switch multiple webapps to Cloudflare Workers' "unbound" mode to go beyond CPU time limits.
  - ascorbic 4y ago
    Bear in mind this is CPU time, not wall clock time. I work with both AWS Lambda functions and Deno Deploy functions every day. I hit the 10s Lambda timeout all the time (things like slow API calls or network requests), but I never hit the timeout for Deno Deploy. You can even use it for things like Server-Sent Events or Websockets. It'll keep the connection open indefinitely, as long as it's not using the CPU.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sealthedeal 4y ago
Just like GoLang, I only wanna use this because that dinosaur is SO CUTE!! hahaha
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
I'm not deep in Node world but I use it and see it being used, who is using Deno out there? Have there been some notable/major ship jumps? Or is it not that kind of situation (perception from when it came on the scene is that's exactly what it is, constantly trying to woo Node devs over). And also there's alot of recognizable brand competition out there from things like Cloudflare, Netlify (but they're an investor in this?), Vercel on fire the last year or two, and not to mention the big FAANG types. Again, who's using this?
- marcofatica 4y ago
  Slack is the biggest I know of https://deno.com/blog/slack https://deno.com/blog/slack
- wperron 4y ago
  Netlify, Supabase and Slack whitelabelling Deno Deploy for starters, I'm sure there are others out there self-hosting as well
  - ChrisArchitect 4y ago
    See now that's interesting - All of those have very out-there brand reach and recognition but who knew they were using Deno, nobody heh. Okay, then, so it's a bit under the radar but ticking away down there, hence the raise. Fairplay.
    - wperron 4y ago
      If you're not following those companies' offerings then it stands to reason you haven't heard about it but all three of them did broadcast pretty widely that they were using Deno, I would assume quite a few people were aware of this.
      - swyx 4y ago
        yup, can confirm nothing about it was hidden (good on them, but better for deno)
jbaczuk 4y ago
Deno Deploy, how is this different than lambda functions, or elastic beanstalk?
eyberg 4y ago
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.
- kentonv 4y ago
  > Having said that, they should never be considered as a multi-tenant (N customers) isolation 'security' barrier. They are there for scaling not security. V8 isolates are absolutely designed for security. For 10 years V8 was the only security barrier between sites in Chrome. Now they have retrofitted strict site isolation for defense-in-depth, but that doesn't mean the V8 team suddenly doesn't care about security. Chrome wants both layers to be secure and will pay a bug bounty if you break either one.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
pharmakom 4y ago
Deno sounds like a powerful runtime, but what is there to sell? I won’t build on anything that isn’t permissively licensed. They can’t charge for anything without license protection.
- erk__ 4y ago
  They are selling a global Deno hosting service https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy
  - gtirloni 4y ago
    Is it Docker Inc all over again?
    - 0des 4y ago
      joyent
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    And what happens when AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, OpenShift, IBM, … roll this out?
    - jacobsenscott 4y ago
      One of them acquihires deno for 100M!
blobbers 4y ago
It will be interesting to see if Deno can provide the level of productivity improvement node.js delivered (was supposed to deliver? continues to deliver?). It's one thing for it to claim supremacy over node, but can it attract the TJ Holowaychuk's of the world and truly generate a full ecosystem.
- azangru 4y ago
  > but can it attract the TJ Holowaychuk's of the world and truly generate a full ecosystem Something like this? https://twitter.com/dassurma/status/1407048553768402949 https://twitter.com/dassurma/status/1407048553768402949
pictur 4y ago
deno seems like a great project that solves problems that don't actually exist
asien 4y ago
- l30n4da5 4y ago
  > Even the source of node it’s just a bunch of function from pre-ES4 Old code does not mean bad code. Seems like a silly thing to look at, honestly. A bunch of java was written pre-java8, does that make it all bad? No, no it doesnt.
  - spoils19 4y ago
    In most scenarios, new ways of writing the same code is a waste of time. I actively discourage use of things like type inference in newer Java versions as it goes against the purity of the original vision of the language. It's a detriment to mental agility, and it also makes scores of incredibly useful, deep books and learning resources outdated and useless.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      How exactly does incessantly repeating yourself, in situations where the compiler is already perfectly aware what you're supposed to say, a "detriment to mental agility"? And how does it make books and learning resources outdated and useless? Old code still works exactly the same as it always did.
    - l30n4da5 4y ago
      being overly dogmatic when it comes to writing code is not a good thing, imo.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    New language features are for new code.
    - l30n4da5 4y ago
      agreed. but old code really doesnt need to be rewritten unless there are bugs.
danielovichdk 4y ago
I read half and thought "how did this get any funding". Who validated this idea and with what measures?
- dubswithus 4y ago
  I think it's similar to many critiques of crypto: It doesn't need to exist. But someone really wants it to regardless.
- chucky123 4y ago
  Mainly because of Ryan who created nodejs. If you have a good track record, investors will throw money at you anyways. Not being pessimistic about this though. Imho Deno seems like a solid improvement over nodejs.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Does this mean we can finally get a REPL where a file can be loaded, modified, then reloaded, without having to restart the whole thing? Seriously my biggest pet peeve with both deno and node.js. In every other REPL I've used this is basic functionality. When I talk about this to JS people they look at me like I'm from mars.
- alexwebb2 4y ago
  JS modules can produce side effects on load. Does that present an obstacle to that kind of REPL pattern?
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    I don't think so. Most repls use a special in repl keyword to accomplish this. For some reason the JS community can't move past "but modules are special". Ocaml has modules too and the repl can reload stuff from a file no problem.
  - stephen 4y ago
    Naive question, but is that dictated in the spec? Probably? Just wondering that, since Deno is rewriting all of npm anyway, it would have been a great time to revisit some of these historical script-y design decisions, to make JavaScript/TypeScript-at-scale suck less. Granted, probably too late now, but as-is neither of Deno's url-based imports or sandboxed-by-default changes has seemed worth the migration cost. But, if they also made something like "everything hot reloads for free" level ergonomic/platform changes, then yeah, I'd be hopping over.
- johnspurlock 4y ago
  Deno has a built-in repl https://deno.land/manual/tools/repl https://deno.land/manual/tools/repl
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Well thanks for reading the first 9 words of my post at least.
vcryan 4y ago
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 is particularly notable.
- Androider 4y ago
  It's usually not enough to be a bit better than what you're trying to displace, you have to be 10X better than the status quo to have any real impact. For example, SVN tried to be a better CVS, while Git came out of left field and destroyed the competition by being 10X better. In that, Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js. Meteor.js also though that funding could be the answer, but it wasn't. They're both clever, great for demos, but not sufficiently so to overcome the sheer inertia of Node+NPM et al. When something truly 10X better arrives, it will be quite apparent. Just like how React spawned a new generation of frameworks, nothing has unseated it yet because all the competition is React-like and not 10X better.
  - stack_framer 4y ago
    This explanation resonates with me. I first saw Ryan Dahl's talk about his Node.js regrets[0] during the early days of the pandemic. I thought I'd be eager to try Deno when it became more mature, but I still haven't tried it. I guess I'm not convinced that it's 10x better than Node.js. [0] https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA
  - javajosh 4y ago
    >Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js In substance they are similar in that they both want/ed tighter "vertical integration" of tools ("DX") in an opinionated way, with the money-making plan being convenient paid hosting. "Look how easy and fun it is to make powerful stuff; we hope you give us money to host it for you!" So far the only company that's had success with this pitch is Amazon of all people, by offering a staggering array of partially specialized EC2 instances behind an API. For whatever reason, it does seem like devs really like their app authoring tools to be independent of their distribution mechanisms. Maybe AWS doesn't trigger this because it doesn't feel like hosting (even though it is). When a whole diverse community seems to act coherently in this way, it's probably a good idea to listen to them. (Alternatively, when a community acts coherently, its ALSO a good idea to try something new.) Deno is quite good. It may even be 10x node, if only because it avoids npm and has a much more thoughtful module system. It's a (much) better DX, too. Can they make money? Time will tell and, luckily, that's not my problem!
didip 4y ago
heh, I knew for sure Deno would be successful from the first moment it appeared on HN and people here were critical of it. My rule of: The more HN criticizes it, the more likely it succeeded, still rings true.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  So crypto is going to be a giant success?
  - ithrow 4y ago
    Depends how you measure success. Being it a trillion dollar I would call it wildly successful.
  - butterfly771 4y ago
    Hi man, you seem to have found something. Transfer your bank deposits to btc eth, and in a few years you will find that they are far away from the banking institutions.
chrismsimpson 4y ago
Interesting raise. I leave the front marketing page of Deno Deploy open in my browser for a few moments and I get the ubiquitous "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." Says it all about the state of the JavaScript ecosystem really.
- leeoniya 4y ago
  unfortunately, webdev does not have a strong performance culture. V8 & Blink/Skia can be crazy fast in the right hands, but it does take some effort and profiling to eek it out.
lxe 4y ago
The business end here is Deno Deploy - a heroku-like. That's what the "startup" behind the funding is. The tech is in service of that.
jaredcwhite 4y ago
The rise of JavaScript-only clouds intended as "defacto" solutions for web development scares the hell out of me. Monocultures are dangerous. At least in the early Node era, it sat alongside all the other flavors of server infra out there with a near-infinite variety of languages, platforms, OSes. Now we're being told that the future of web development is…Deno? That's it? One tool? One language? One platform? Not the web I intend to build and participate in, I can tell you that right now.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Granted, I don't pay a lot of attention to it, but I thought Docker(files) ended up being the defacto standard, not Javascript? I'm sure Deno will tell you the future is Deno. You don't have to believe them.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  It may not be the case right now, but I'm pretty sure their platform will eventually run anything that compiles to WASM. This is just the first step.
- spencerchubb 4y ago
  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 other languages. Also, it looks like wasm works on Deno, so that gives some other languages.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    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.
felipeccastro 4y ago
I would love to try Deno deploy, but right now there are two deal breakers for me: - why is the CPU time limit so low? 10ms (or even 50ms in Pro version) seems a limit very easy to blow for any sufficiently complex app - why is there no data storage offering available? I'm not sure I see the point of edge deploys while data is still only accessible through a centralized database server. Having a way to deploy a sqlite database next to the running app seems like an easy way to realize the gains of edge deployments. I'm currently trying Fly.io which seems to cover both of these issues, but I wonder if I'm missing something here - or perhaps this service is intended for very different use cases.
- hayd 4y ago
  I _believe_ there is an important distinction here between "CPU Time per request" and "Time per request". Most complex apps are going to be IO-bound which shouldn't count towards CPU time. It's strange this isn't more explicit.
  - ascorbic 4y ago
    Yeah, I found this confusing at first. But you can even run WebSockets on it for minutes at a time, or piped large files through it taking many seconds. As long as they're not using CPU, they can keep running.
nickjj 4y ago
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 indefinitely. These things sound great and almost a dream come true but how realistic is it to consider being able to do this in most web apps? As soon as your application uses a SQL database and you have database migrations then you're out of luck because a commit from 2 months ago might expect a different database schema than the current version and while it's common to migrate in backwards compatible ways, the backwards compatibility is usually only temporary until you finish migrating from A to B. Long story short, this sounds cool but in practice is really only applicable to static sites or dynamic sites where you plan to keep a version of your database and code base backwards compatible from day 1 to current day (which I've never seen done in any app developed over the last ~20 years of freelancing for many different companies). 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.
- nilsbunger 4y ago
  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.
  - wokwokwok 4y ago
    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 with maybe a 10GB cut down version of it, which is a pain in the ass to deal with, just for example, for local dev environments. I agree with the parent post; it’s cute, but I can’t imagine historical per commit deployments being useful for me, honestly.
trentthethief 4y ago
Serious question, how do investors plan on making a return on their investment? Where is the cash in this?
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  There is extreme vendor lockin with services like Deno. I'm sure that it'll be much more expensive in the future.
  - trentthethief 4y ago
    It is the lock in and potential feature gates that worry me. Also, it scares me developers will skill up in something that can disappear like the wind because the company didn’t hit their goals.
  - ascorbic 4y ago
    It's all standards-based code. The WInterCG project makes it even more portable: code should be easy to move between Deno, CLoudflare etc.
DrFell 4y ago
I can't believe how much of a nuisance JavaScript monoglots make themselves. My God, go learn a server-side language, please. I will teach you if you stop this.
- draw_down 4y ago
sntran 4y ago
I find Deno very interesting. It's written in Rust by Mozilla, executing TypeScript by Microsoft on V8 engine by Google, and its name is sorted version of Node. That aside, I have been very productive with Deno. Web Standards are going in the right direction, and Deno helps using them easy. The Request/Response model with streams make a lot of sense, and provides lots of way to optimize. I understand performance is not the best compared to Elixir or Rust, but the ability to quickly download Deno, run a web server, import modules through URL, and start hacking and testing, then bundle into a cross-platform executable is a life-saver. No installation step, no build tool in between.
- neophyt3 4y ago
  node can do all this stuff too
  - sntran 4y ago
    I'm no stranger to Node.js, but everytime I want to start a project with it, I need to setup package.json, install TypeScript, Ava/Jest/Mocha or what have you, a bundle tool like rebuild, and then I can start writing code. If I want to watch it, I need to install another dev dependency. And if I want to write a web server, well, time to find out what the trendy web server these days, and which router to use. Whereas I can just create a main.ts file, `deno run/test -A --watch main.ts` and start importing the server from std. Yes, you can do pretty much anything in anything, but for me, Deno lets me start up faster. Oh, and we're not getting to the cross-platform build yet.
neya 4y ago
> 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 Javascript has a wider adoption than others is because it’s forced upon us. Browsers understand just Javascript to display web pages, period. Doesn’t make it the best because of that reason. I say this as an experienced IT consultant managing a wide array of projects over my career across industries. You know what usually bites me when I touch code that has not been touched for 6 months (usually a late contract renewal)? It’s not my Elixir or Ruby code that’s running on autopilot. It’s the stupid Javascript with its Node based dependencies all failing randomly in each direction just because some developer used a library for something trivial they could have written themselves or super likely because Babel or Webpack decided to change their config files so my entire JS pipeline breaks. JS is a language full of patchwork and its entire ecosystem, more so - it certainly has gotten better over the years. If it works for you, then great. But it’s a far cry from a “one solution for everything that’s better than everything else”. Personally, I use Coffeescript. It has been a breeze from all aspects.
- MarquesMa 4y ago
  > You want to sell Javascript based solutions, go for it. But don’t push this nonsense like “No language like Javascript”. The only reason Javascript has a wider adoption than others is that it’s forced upon us. It is forced upon us doesn't mean it can't be universal. On the contrary, it usually is. It's like how USD is kinda forced around the world but it's universal nonetheless.
- alephnan 4y ago
  > 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 touched for 6 months (usually a late contract renewal)?... It’s the stupid Javascript with its Node based dependencies all failing randomly in each direction just because some developer used a library for something trivial they could have written themselves or super likely because Babel or Webpack decided to change their config files so my entire JS pipeline breaks. 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. > Personally, I use Coffeescript. It has been a breeze from all aspects. That's a cool story, but Deno uses TypeScript so the whole JavaScript rant crumbles here. > Browsers understand just Javascript to display web pages, period. Bits like this make me feel like you're just throwing a bunch of domain-related words together and hopes something sticks. Browsers understand more than JavaScript, and JavaScript isn't the control layer for logic, which can including displaying page, but ultimately its HTML that is for displaying the web page. > I say this as an experienced IT consultant managing a wide array of projects over my career across industries. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oofbey 4y ago
JavaScript is popular because of browsers not because it is in any way a good language. Name another popular language with half its quirks. WASM will eventually spell the end of JavaScript’s hegemony as it becomes easier to build web apps in other languages. So good luck Deno. You’re betting on a sinking ship.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  C++ _easily_ has many if not more quriks than JS. There have been over a half dozen major revisions of the language since ~1988. Each one added in sometimes dramatic ways new syntax or idioms that required major relearning. If you learned and used C++ in 1995 you would be a liability if thrown into a modern 2015+ C++ codebase (well a liability until you learn all the new quirks and changes in the language). You might drop into a C++ codebase from 1990 that looks more like C (it was made to be mostly backwards compatible after all), then see a codebase from 1999 that's chock full of the most cryptic template metaprogramming imagingable and complete spaghetti structure of OO "design patterns", and then see a codebase from 2010 making much more heavy use of the updated standard library and a functional style of programming. The sheer scope of C++ as a language is frightening as it requires quite deep knowledge of the parts you're using. Sometimes even deep knowledge of the history and rationale for parts of the language you're using existing. And if you screw something up you might silently introduce a major security hole, OS crash, or worse--the language gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself from. Oh and there's no standard build system, no standard package manager, no standard project layout, no standard for code formatting, documentation, etc. Everyone has their own bespoke solutions that make the JS world look amazing in contrast.
  - oofbey 4y ago
    True, and, C++ is popular in that people use it. But I don't think many people really like it.
weird-eye-issue 4y ago
Got a 502, oopsies https://i.imgur.com/YvZ3sYg.png https://i.imgur.com/YvZ3sYg.png
worik 4y ago
"JavaScript is unlike other programming languages in that it is the universal scripting language." WTF? How is that even slightly true? C is the universal scripting language, in exactly the same way. Nothing happening in this space makes any sense to me.
- numlock86 4y ago
  There's interpreters/runtimes for C? At least that's the go-to definition for scripting languages.
  - biztos 4y ago
    I think the point was merely that JavaScript is obviously not the "universal scripting language" and claiming it is demonstrates not just hubris but ignorance. That said, I have tons of little one-off utilities I launch with "go run random-thing.go" because I don't care about the second or two it takes to compile, and if C were my everyday language I'm sure I'd have a compile-and-run wrapper handy. At that point, it's effectively a scripting language, right?
    - ascorbic 4y ago
      Which scripting language has a better claim to being universal? JavaScript runs on billions of diverse systems worldwide, both browser, server and CLI.
      - worik 4y ago
        perl python lua scheme bash
        numlock86 4y ago
        Which browsers support these?
- joshxyz 4y ago
  try running C in your browser lol
WuxiFingerHold 4y ago
A lot of marketing fluff and exaggerations but the core of is very interesting. Combine this with a real serverless Postgres like https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/ and this could indeed change a lot the way mainstream apps are build an deployed.
Drblessing 4y ago
Is there a NextJS-like framework for Deno?
- ascorbic 4y ago
  There's Fresh, but you can run also Next.js on Deno (and Remix and SvelteKit and Astro and Hydrogen and Qwik and 11ty and SolidJS and more). We do it at Netlify. See the examples linked here: https://docs.netlify.com/netlify-labs/experimental-features/edge-functions/#use-cases https://docs.netlify.com/netlify-labs/experimental-features/...
- o_m 4y ago
  Remix supports Deno on Deno Deploy: https://remix.run/docs/en/v1/api/conventions#serverbuildtarget https://remix.run/docs/en/v1/api/conventions#serverbuildtarg...
ebingdom 4y ago
> Cold start (time to first response, ms) O(100) O(1000) O(10000) Ugh, that's not how big O notation works.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  On the other hand, it is how it is often used informally in speech. I would probably have written eg ~100 instead, but I easily understood what they meant.
- fwg 4y ago
  Yes it is. Big-O means given an arbitrary function of some complexity, it is definitely bounded by this other function from the top, i.e. that other function is always larger than our arbitrary function. f(n) \in O(n^2) means n^2 (ignoring constant factors) is always larger than f(n). If you have no polynomial elements in your O(g), then you only state the constant factor. Like in O(1). So saying Cold_start(service) \in O(100 ms) is exactly the same as saying the cold start will always be below 100 ms. It makes sense to not say they are all O(1), although strictly they are, as the interesting bit is the difference in magnitude of the constant.
shetill 4y ago
who?
quickthrower2 4y ago
Wow I had a play, within 30 seconds I had deployed their hello world. Checked devtools and it took between 30-100ms (I am not on a great internet connection, but this proves it is somewhere near me globally!). Also loving .deno.dev as a fairly nice top level domain for a blog. E.g. johnsmith.deno.dev.

608 points by 0xedb 4y ago

I think it's a good opportunity for Meteor, which is a very interesting framework but with some technical debt, to jump ship on Deno and start fresh again. Maybe they could try replacing their in-house synchronization mechanisms by managed services such as AppSync. Randomly wondering :)

kirankp89 4y ago

I’ve never been interested in JS as I mostly work in C++ but the ease of install/use of Deno over Node made me actually want to try it. It’s nice to have access to a bunch of web tech with a single binary. Very excited to see where this project goes!

mmastrac 4y ago

I played with an early version of Deno a few years back and it was already way more comfortable to use than node. It's a real counterexample to second-system syndrome. The only reason I didn't continue was a lack of ARM support.

zackangelo 4y ago
Surprised this is the case because I use their Rust v8 bindings on an ARM laptop almost every day. Have you tried building it from source?
- mmastrac 4y ago
  It was a few years back and I was mainly playing with a few early projects. I was very productive, but wanted to target my Raspberry Pi and it just wasn't there. I ended up going 100% rust instead.
  - mattlondon 4y ago
    There are still no RPi builds as far as I am aware, which is a shame as there are now Mac silicon builds so not sure what the hold up is. I do wonder if there are.more Raspberry Pi's out there than M1/M2 Macs :) Someone is doing the builds here - been using them and seem ok: https://github.com/LukeChannings/deno-arm64 https://github.com/LukeChannings/deno-arm64
    - crowlKats 4y ago
      The M1 builds are made manually by us, as github doesnt provide any runners. the same problem does apply for linux arm, however we don't have any arm linux systems any one of the members use; and building on a pi is a no-go, as that can take 70+ minutes, so that would make our release cycle a lot more complicated. Either way, we are investigating potential possibilities besides waiting for github to have runners available
      - pcl 4y ago
        Have you tried building in a rpi virtual machine on a Mac? I have no idea what the performance would look like, but it’d be easy enough to try, especially since you are already managing your own max builders. I want to say I followed these instructions for doing so recently: https://gist.github.com/plembo/c4920016312f058209f5765cb9a3a25e https://gist.github.com/plembo/c4920016312f058209f5765cb9a3a...
beaker52 4y ago
What made it "way more comfortable" for you?
DangitBobby 4y ago
I had a very different experience. I very much wanted to make it work, but trying to use it with existing npm packages and import maps was incredibly painful, and I ultimately switched over to node for that project.
- toastercat 4y ago
  Haven't tried import maps, but so long as the npm package uses ES Modules and doesn't rely on Node specific APIs, you should be good to go.

msoad 4y ago

Running little processes on the server without the VM/K8s expensive abstraction has a lot of potential. I'm sure Deno will do great! At least this way of deploying web apps has a lot of potential.

whatever1 4y ago
Isn’t this what an operating system is doing by default?
- msoad 4y ago
  I should say "untrusted code" to be more specific.

femiagbabiaka 4y ago

Are there any sources for the claims made in the chart on the second half of the page or are they theoretical? Seems really cool in theory!

password4321 4y ago

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

bowsamic 4y ago
I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC
- nikanj 4y ago
  You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. They will force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or kill the company trying
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    > 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
    - mrkurt 4y ago
      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.
      - ushakov 4y ago
        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)
    - 4y ago

blocked_again 4y ago

Is Deno going to be the first runtime environment to IPO?

vaishnavsm 4y ago
I think Sun Microsystems IPOd
- andruby 4y ago
  Were they not making & selling hardware at the time of IPO?

jhgg 4y ago

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

tick_tock_tick 4y ago
Yeah unless I'm missing something isn't this just a stand alone company offering roughly workers?
- mrkurt 4y ago
  This is an open source JavaScript runtime with a hosted business model. Deno is great. Deno Deploy is a reasonable way for them to make money.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    Meanwhile, Cloudflare says they are open sourcing Cloudflare Workers runtime: https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081 https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    CloudFlare workers is on my radar because of an ecology of other "edge" products that are in the works or already released. That's what Deno would need to catchup on to be on the table for discussion for me. Otherwise it remains a toy I use in my spare time (which I do enjoy at the moment).
mattlondon 4y ago
You could say the same about AWS Azure, and GCP. Competition is good.
- jhgg 4y ago
  Competition is great - sure, but I want to know what Deno gives me over its competitors.

Zababa 4y ago

> Cold start (time to first response, ms) O(100) O(1000) O(10000) I think ~100 ~1000 ~10000 would be clearer than using the big O notation, since this has nothing to do with fuinctions.

vaishnavsm 4y ago
Agreed! I'm pretty sure they're just using O(x) to mean on the order of x, since big O of any constant is the same (unless that's their point??? :O)
laputan_machine 4y ago
I genuinely don't even understand it. I was either taught wrong, learned wrong or this doesn't make sense. O(100) is constant time, so it's no different to saying O(1) or whatever, I've only ever used O to talk about how we care about the time complexity of a function, e.g. comparing linear time to quadratic time. 1 is the same as 100, irrelevant.
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
If it’s big O notation, it makes no sense because O(10000)=O(1000)=O(100)=O(1).
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  I think they're trying to communicate that those are worst case latency numbers. You're correct in that formal use of Big O notation doesn't distinguish constants.
csmpltn 4y ago
It's that easy to raise money these days, at the 10% inflation mark. Spin up a webpage full of nonsense promises and they'll come chasing after you to take their cash.
koshergweilo 4y ago
I'm not sure, I'm pretty sure they're trying to communicate that these are worst case estimates. ~100 seems like it's communicating average case estimates (big theta notation), which isn't really the same thing

caust1c 4y ago

The color changing on this page gives me a migraine: https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy I like Deno in principle, but I'd love to see how Slack, Github and Netlify are using it.

cloudyglider 4y ago
Weird... it's having the same affect on me, something about slowly fading to white background is making me flinch. Is this a known phenomenon?
- airstrike 4y ago
  As a second data point, I added the same effect to my blog back in, I don’t know, 2002 and all my friends complained about getting a headache as well, so I turned it off For some reason it never had that same negative effect on me
- yccs27 4y ago
  I suspect that it basically confuses your brain because it tries to adjust the "white balance" so that the background becomes normal white. But the background is just saturated enough and changing so quickly that it just can't follow.
asdfasdfdsfa 4y ago
- caust1c 4y ago
  Yeah I love making prospective customers feel pain too. /s
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    The world doesn’t exist to cater to your weird specific thing that gives you a headache

qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago

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

nikanj 4y ago
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”
- wperron 4y ago
  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)
lghh 4y ago
> are there real-world, commercial products actually running on """serverless""" architecture? Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I have worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%. > 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 Considering you have to ask if there are _any_ products running in a serverless environment, I would imagine you need more exposure to the concept before you make such a large judgement on it.
- qweqwerwerwerwr 4y ago
  what was the product and the scale then?
  - lghh 4y ago
    I'd rather not list my last two companies or their scale, but I can assure you they are real companies that exist, have users, and make money. I'm not sure why I even would be asked to.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

> 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?

brtkdotse 4y ago
It’s amusing to see a whole generation of senior developers (“senior” as in 5+ years of experience) that haven’t experienced web development without React[0] and who proceed to reinvent PHP/ASP.NET/RoR. [0] Used here as shorthand for “modern js driven development”
- efdee 4y ago
  We could really do without this kind of snark here. Not only is it condescending, but it's also just plain wrong, either on purpose or due to the writer not being familiar with the subject at hand.
- dntrkv 4y ago
  Such a tiring take... Nobody is reinventing PHP or RoR development. What is happening is the community taking all our favorite parts of these stacks and combining and implementing them in ways that facilitate a dev experience that we could only have dreamed of back in the PHP/RoR days. - Senior dev that started off in the PHP and then RoR days
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Yep totally agree with this. - Engineering Lead who got his start in PHP/ASP(pre .net) and loves the modern ecosystem despite its flaws
  - manigandham 4y ago
    Back in RoR days? It's still here with new releases offering modern features. ASP.NET is even more cutting edge.
- jacobr 4y ago

spicyusername 4y ago

Is the intent of this product to compete with something like Netlify?

crowlKats 4y ago
No, Netlify actually uses Deno to some degree: https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-with-edge-functions/ https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-w...
- spicyusername 4y ago
  Right, but the $21M of funding seems to be for Deno Deploy, the product, not Deno, the CLI.
  - crowlKats 4y ago
    The wording in that blogpost might be a bit off, here it is more in-depth: https://deno.com/blog/netlify-edge-functions-on-deno-deploy https://deno.com/blog/netlify-edge-functions-on-deno-deploy Netlify is using Deploy

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

What does O(100) mean in the comparison table?

dragonwriter 4y ago
I think they are using O(x) as a shorthand for antilog10(log10(x)±0.5). Or, in simpler terms, O(x) = “approximately x, to one significant figure”
sfink 4y ago
"on the order of 100ms" It's misusing big-O notation for "order of magnitude", but after I initially tripped over it, it seemed clear enough.
selljamhere 4y ago
It’s used as a comparison to the alternative, O(1000), an order-of-magnitude improvement.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sergiotapia 4y ago

Where's the angle for the investors - what will Deno do to produce the returns necessary for such a high amount? I thought Deno would be the eradication of Node and bring stability to Javascript. From the outside it seems to be firmly on it's way to being just another Zeit/Vercel. :(

potamic 4y ago

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 shit together in life, perpetually chasing the romance of utopia.

jitl 4y ago
There is already a system for building a NPM node package from a Deno package, called dnt (deno to node). It's maintained by some Deno team members. Here's a blog post they wrote about porting "Oak" (a deno HTTP server framework) to Node: https://deno.com/blog/dnt-oak https://deno.com/blog/dnt-oak The nice thing about Deno conceptually, is that it's much more similar to the browser platform than node is. It uses ES6 only, has things like `fetch` built-in by default, and generally follows browser standards around interfaces like Request, Response, etc. Instead of needing a complicated build process to make Node code work on the browser, now we have a complicated build process to make Deno/Browser code work on Node. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- capableweb 4y ago
  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).
  - jitl 4y ago
    I think this requires the `--experimental-fetch` command-line argument (per https://nodejs.org/tr/blog/release/v17.5.0/ https://nodejs.org/tr/blog/release/v17.5.0/), so I don't think it qualifies as "by default".
    - wging 4y ago
      That's an old blog post; the current release is 18.4.0, which supports `fetch` without a command-line argument. You do get this warning the first time it's invoked, though: (node:340760) ExperimentalWarning: The Fetch API is an experimental feature. This feature could change at any time (Use `node --trace-warnings ...` to show where the warning was created) (some later blog posts that mention fetch being enabled-by-default and in the global scope are https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/v18-release-announce/ https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/v18-release-announc... and https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v18.0.0/ https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v18.0.0/)

loftsy 4y ago

An "isolate cloud" is exactly how Google App Engine worked 10 years ago. It was a good idea then and is still a good idea now.

pcj-github 4y ago

Comments are a bit negative. I for one think they are onto something here. Surprised it's only 21M. I would have expected in these market conditions to beef up more for the next 2-3 years.

vincentmarle 4y ago
> Surprised it's only 21M. Indeed, especially when you compare with a company such as Supabase (which is working on way less interesting technology imho) who just raised $80M: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31328783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31328783
- mrkurt 4y ago
  Deno probably would have raised $80M if they'd raised the same time Supabase did. Investors got quite a bit more tight fisted between January and April.
  - chucky123 4y ago
    Good point.

dirtyaura 4y ago

Can someone more knowledgeable highlight what kind of security model do these Deno deployments have compared to virtual machines and containers, if they are isolated at the process level.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Johannesbourg 4y ago

Somebody doesn't understand O notation.

pdpi 4y ago
They're abusing the notation, but doing so in a way that's perfectly clear.
m00dy 4y ago
I also didn't get it. so I think in their notaion O(10) has greater magnitude than (>) O(1)
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  You're expected to read it out loud (in English), where one of the conventional readings of O(f) is "order of f". Conveniently "order of 100" is usually taken to mean not asymptotic behavior bounded by a constant multiple of 100, but a range within an order of magnitude or so of 100. Which is to say, they're saying Deno has a cold start time of ~100 ms, package size ~10M, a physical machine can support ~1k instances.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    cool, it is good to know but, at the same time, it is weird. I would use x convention to deliver that message. That comparison table is there for a reason and that is to deliver a marketing message. I'm sure there could be some better ways to deliver that message.

vlunkr 4y ago

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 Ruby and Python have continued to improve. 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. EDIT: I haven't learned typescript yet, based on the replies, it seems like that could be a good reason to choose it. Seems like a nice middle-ground between typical scripting and compiled languages.

timmg 4y ago
You're kinda stuck writing JS on the frontend. The (only) advantage of also using it on the backend is that you can share code. In some cases, I could see that being compelling. FWIW, I think Typescript would make an even stronger case. And I think(?) that's one thing Deno is trying to do.
- pmoleri 4y ago
  Sharing code is great, I've moved processing between backend and front-end or even share the same code in both. Makes SSR+SPA possible using the same code. Typescript is a must for me, but I don't need Deno for that. I haven't used beyond scripting but for the time being I don't see a mayor benefit over node or ts-node other than easier/zero project setup.
mrkurt 4y ago
I like TypeScript and would like to write backends in TypeScript. I'm coming around on Elixir. I never want to write Go that interacts with a database again. Rust seems complicated. I don't think I'm smart or committed enough to get anywhere with rust.
- kbd 4y ago
  > I never want to write Go that interacts with a database again. Why? I’ve been using sqlx and it seems fine.

pseudosavant 4y ago

As a Deno fan I was surprised to learn that the free tier for Deno Deploy includes 100k requests per day and 100GB of bandwidth monthly. I know I'll be trying it out now.

benatkin 4y ago
I think Deno Deploy and using Deno on fly.io could be a powerful combo. Deno has some advantages that definitely lend themselves to having control of your entire MicroVMs. An app could easily be split between serverless-friendly and non-serverless-friendly parts of the stack by using both together.
mkroman 4y ago
> Up to 10ms CPU time per request So less than 17 minutes of CPU time per day - not a lot, but also not nothing.. But at 10ms per request, what would one use it for? Just server-side rendering for something simple?
- crowlKats 4y ago
  proper applications as well. example is the https://deno.land https://deno.land website has an average CPU time of 6ms. CPU time means it doesnt include any IO bound operations, so ie doing a fetch request wont really contribute to the CPU time.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    Average time 6ms with hard cap at 10ms sounds like a ticking timebomb you don't dare to put in production. I've had to switch multiple webapps to Cloudflare Workers' "unbound" mode to go beyond CPU time limits.
- ascorbic 4y ago
  Bear in mind this is CPU time, not wall clock time. I work with both AWS Lambda functions and Deno Deploy functions every day. I hit the 10s Lambda timeout all the time (things like slow API calls or network requests), but I never hit the timeout for Deno Deploy. You can even use it for things like Server-Sent Events or Websockets. It'll keep the connection open indefinitely, as long as it's not using the CPU.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sealthedeal 4y ago

Just like GoLang, I only wanna use this because that dinosaur is SO CUTE!! hahaha

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

I'm not deep in Node world but I use it and see it being used, who is using Deno out there? Have there been some notable/major ship jumps? Or is it not that kind of situation (perception from when it came on the scene is that's exactly what it is, constantly trying to woo Node devs over). And also there's alot of recognizable brand competition out there from things like Cloudflare, Netlify (but they're an investor in this?), Vercel on fire the last year or two, and not to mention the big FAANG types. Again, who's using this?

marcofatica 4y ago
Slack is the biggest I know of https://deno.com/blog/slack https://deno.com/blog/slack
wperron 4y ago
Netlify, Supabase and Slack whitelabelling Deno Deploy for starters, I'm sure there are others out there self-hosting as well
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  See now that's interesting - All of those have very out-there brand reach and recognition but who knew they were using Deno, nobody heh. Okay, then, so it's a bit under the radar but ticking away down there, hence the raise. Fairplay.
  - wperron 4y ago
    If you're not following those companies' offerings then it stands to reason you haven't heard about it but all three of them did broadcast pretty widely that they were using Deno, I would assume quite a few people were aware of this.
    - swyx 4y ago
      yup, can confirm nothing about it was hidden (good on them, but better for deno)

jbaczuk 4y ago

Deno Deploy, how is this different than lambda functions, or elastic beanstalk?

eyberg 4y ago

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.

kentonv 4y ago
> Having said that, they should never be considered as a multi-tenant (N customers) isolation 'security' barrier. They are there for scaling not security. V8 isolates are absolutely designed for security. For 10 years V8 was the only security barrier between sites in Chrome. Now they have retrofitted strict site isolation for defense-in-depth, but that doesn't mean the V8 team suddenly doesn't care about security. Chrome wants both layers to be secure and will pay a bug bounty if you break either one.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

pharmakom 4y ago

Deno sounds like a powerful runtime, but what is there to sell? I won’t build on anything that isn’t permissively licensed. They can’t charge for anything without license protection.

erk__ 4y ago
They are selling a global Deno hosting service https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy
- gtirloni 4y ago
  Is it Docker Inc all over again?
  - 0des 4y ago
    joyent
- pharmakom 4y ago
  And what happens when AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, OpenShift, IBM, … roll this out?
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    One of them acquihires deno for 100M!

blobbers 4y ago

It will be interesting to see if Deno can provide the level of productivity improvement node.js delivered (was supposed to deliver? continues to deliver?). It's one thing for it to claim supremacy over node, but can it attract the TJ Holowaychuk's of the world and truly generate a full ecosystem.

azangru 4y ago
> but can it attract the TJ Holowaychuk's of the world and truly generate a full ecosystem Something like this? https://twitter.com/dassurma/status/1407048553768402949 https://twitter.com/dassurma/status/1407048553768402949

pictur 4y ago

deno seems like a great project that solves problems that don't actually exist

asien 4y ago

l30n4da5 4y ago
> Even the source of node it’s just a bunch of function from pre-ES4 Old code does not mean bad code. Seems like a silly thing to look at, honestly. A bunch of java was written pre-java8, does that make it all bad? No, no it doesnt.
- spoils19 4y ago
  In most scenarios, new ways of writing the same code is a waste of time. I actively discourage use of things like type inference in newer Java versions as it goes against the purity of the original vision of the language. It's a detriment to mental agility, and it also makes scores of incredibly useful, deep books and learning resources outdated and useless.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    How exactly does incessantly repeating yourself, in situations where the compiler is already perfectly aware what you're supposed to say, a "detriment to mental agility"? And how does it make books and learning resources outdated and useless? Old code still works exactly the same as it always did.
  - l30n4da5 4y ago
    being overly dogmatic when it comes to writing code is not a good thing, imo.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  New language features are for new code.
  - l30n4da5 4y ago
    agreed. but old code really doesnt need to be rewritten unless there are bugs.

danielovichdk 4y ago

I read half and thought "how did this get any funding". Who validated this idea and with what measures?

dubswithus 4y ago
I think it's similar to many critiques of crypto: It doesn't need to exist. But someone really wants it to regardless.
chucky123 4y ago
Mainly because of Ryan who created nodejs. If you have a good track record, investors will throw money at you anyways. Not being pessimistic about this though. Imho Deno seems like a solid improvement over nodejs.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Does this mean we can finally get a REPL where a file can be loaded, modified, then reloaded, without having to restart the whole thing? Seriously my biggest pet peeve with both deno and node.js. In every other REPL I've used this is basic functionality. When I talk about this to JS people they look at me like I'm from mars.

alexwebb2 4y ago
JS modules can produce side effects on load. Does that present an obstacle to that kind of REPL pattern?
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I don't think so. Most repls use a special in repl keyword to accomplish this. For some reason the JS community can't move past "but modules are special". Ocaml has modules too and the repl can reload stuff from a file no problem.
- stephen 4y ago
  Naive question, but is that dictated in the spec? Probably? Just wondering that, since Deno is rewriting all of npm anyway, it would have been a great time to revisit some of these historical script-y design decisions, to make JavaScript/TypeScript-at-scale suck less. Granted, probably too late now, but as-is neither of Deno's url-based imports or sandboxed-by-default changes has seemed worth the migration cost. But, if they also made something like "everything hot reloads for free" level ergonomic/platform changes, then yeah, I'd be hopping over.
johnspurlock 4y ago
Deno has a built-in repl https://deno.land/manual/tools/repl https://deno.land/manual/tools/repl
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Well thanks for reading the first 9 words of my post at least.

vcryan 4y ago

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 is particularly notable.

Androider 4y ago
It's usually not enough to be a bit better than what you're trying to displace, you have to be 10X better than the status quo to have any real impact. For example, SVN tried to be a better CVS, while Git came out of left field and destroyed the competition by being 10X better. In that, Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js. Meteor.js also though that funding could be the answer, but it wasn't. They're both clever, great for demos, but not sufficiently so to overcome the sheer inertia of Node+NPM et al. When something truly 10X better arrives, it will be quite apparent. Just like how React spawned a new generation of frameworks, nothing has unseated it yet because all the competition is React-like and not 10X better.
- stack_framer 4y ago
  This explanation resonates with me. I first saw Ryan Dahl's talk about his Node.js regrets[0] during the early days of the pandemic. I thought I'd be eager to try Deno when it became more mature, but I still haven't tried it. I guess I'm not convinced that it's 10x better than Node.js. [0] https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA
- javajosh 4y ago
  >Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js In substance they are similar in that they both want/ed tighter "vertical integration" of tools ("DX") in an opinionated way, with the money-making plan being convenient paid hosting. "Look how easy and fun it is to make powerful stuff; we hope you give us money to host it for you!" So far the only company that's had success with this pitch is Amazon of all people, by offering a staggering array of partially specialized EC2 instances behind an API. For whatever reason, it does seem like devs really like their app authoring tools to be independent of their distribution mechanisms. Maybe AWS doesn't trigger this because it doesn't feel like hosting (even though it is). When a whole diverse community seems to act coherently in this way, it's probably a good idea to listen to them. (Alternatively, when a community acts coherently, its ALSO a good idea to try something new.) Deno is quite good. It may even be 10x node, if only because it avoids npm and has a much more thoughtful module system. It's a (much) better DX, too. Can they make money? Time will tell and, luckily, that's not my problem!

didip 4y ago

heh, I knew for sure Deno would be successful from the first moment it appeared on HN and people here were critical of it. My rule of: The more HN criticizes it, the more likely it succeeded, still rings true.

dubswithus 4y ago
So crypto is going to be a giant success?
- ithrow 4y ago
  Depends how you measure success. Being it a trillion dollar I would call it wildly successful.
- butterfly771 4y ago
  Hi man, you seem to have found something. Transfer your bank deposits to btc eth, and in a few years you will find that they are far away from the banking institutions.

chrismsimpson 4y ago

Interesting raise. I leave the front marketing page of Deno Deploy open in my browser for a few moments and I get the ubiquitous "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." Says it all about the state of the JavaScript ecosystem really.

leeoniya 4y ago
unfortunately, webdev does not have a strong performance culture. V8 & Blink/Skia can be crazy fast in the right hands, but it does take some effort and profiling to eek it out.

lxe 4y ago

The business end here is Deno Deploy - a heroku-like. That's what the "startup" behind the funding is. The tech is in service of that.

jaredcwhite 4y ago

The rise of JavaScript-only clouds intended as "defacto" solutions for web development scares the hell out of me. Monocultures are dangerous. At least in the early Node era, it sat alongside all the other flavors of server infra out there with a near-infinite variety of languages, platforms, OSes. Now we're being told that the future of web development is…Deno? That's it? One tool? One language? One platform? Not the web I intend to build and participate in, I can tell you that right now.

madeofpalk 4y ago
Granted, I don't pay a lot of attention to it, but I thought Docker(files) ended up being the defacto standard, not Javascript? I'm sure Deno will tell you the future is Deno. You don't have to believe them.
ricardobeat 4y ago
It may not be the case right now, but I'm pretty sure their platform will eventually run anything that compiles to WASM. This is just the first step.
spencerchubb 4y ago
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 other languages. Also, it looks like wasm works on Deno, so that gives some other languages.
- int_19h 4y ago
  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.

felipeccastro 4y ago

I would love to try Deno deploy, but right now there are two deal breakers for me: - why is the CPU time limit so low? 10ms (or even 50ms in Pro version) seems a limit very easy to blow for any sufficiently complex app - why is there no data storage offering available? I'm not sure I see the point of edge deploys while data is still only accessible through a centralized database server. Having a way to deploy a sqlite database next to the running app seems like an easy way to realize the gains of edge deployments. I'm currently trying Fly.io which seems to cover both of these issues, but I wonder if I'm missing something here - or perhaps this service is intended for very different use cases.

hayd 4y ago
I _believe_ there is an important distinction here between "CPU Time per request" and "Time per request". Most complex apps are going to be IO-bound which shouldn't count towards CPU time. It's strange this isn't more explicit.
- ascorbic 4y ago
  Yeah, I found this confusing at first. But you can even run WebSockets on it for minutes at a time, or piped large files through it taking many seconds. As long as they're not using CPU, they can keep running.

nickjj 4y ago

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 indefinitely. These things sound great and almost a dream come true but how realistic is it to consider being able to do this in most web apps? As soon as your application uses a SQL database and you have database migrations then you're out of luck because a commit from 2 months ago might expect a different database schema than the current version and while it's common to migrate in backwards compatible ways, the backwards compatibility is usually only temporary until you finish migrating from A to B. Long story short, this sounds cool but in practice is really only applicable to static sites or dynamic sites where you plan to keep a version of your database and code base backwards compatible from day 1 to current day (which I've never seen done in any app developed over the last ~20 years of freelancing for many different companies). 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.

nilsbunger 4y ago
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.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  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 with maybe a 10GB cut down version of it, which is a pain in the ass to deal with, just for example, for local dev environments. I agree with the parent post; it’s cute, but I can’t imagine historical per commit deployments being useful for me, honestly.

trentthethief 4y ago

Serious question, how do investors plan on making a return on their investment? Where is the cash in this?

shiftpgdn 4y ago
There is extreme vendor lockin with services like Deno. I'm sure that it'll be much more expensive in the future.
- trentthethief 4y ago
  It is the lock in and potential feature gates that worry me. Also, it scares me developers will skill up in something that can disappear like the wind because the company didn’t hit their goals.
- ascorbic 4y ago
  It's all standards-based code. The WInterCG project makes it even more portable: code should be easy to move between Deno, CLoudflare etc.

DrFell 4y ago

I can't believe how much of a nuisance JavaScript monoglots make themselves. My God, go learn a server-side language, please. I will teach you if you stop this.

draw_down 4y ago

sntran 4y ago

I find Deno very interesting. It's written in Rust by Mozilla, executing TypeScript by Microsoft on V8 engine by Google, and its name is sorted version of Node. That aside, I have been very productive with Deno. Web Standards are going in the right direction, and Deno helps using them easy. The Request/Response model with streams make a lot of sense, and provides lots of way to optimize. I understand performance is not the best compared to Elixir or Rust, but the ability to quickly download Deno, run a web server, import modules through URL, and start hacking and testing, then bundle into a cross-platform executable is a life-saver. No installation step, no build tool in between.

neophyt3 4y ago
node can do all this stuff too
- sntran 4y ago
  I'm no stranger to Node.js, but everytime I want to start a project with it, I need to setup package.json, install TypeScript, Ava/Jest/Mocha or what have you, a bundle tool like rebuild, and then I can start writing code. If I want to watch it, I need to install another dev dependency. And if I want to write a web server, well, time to find out what the trendy web server these days, and which router to use. Whereas I can just create a main.ts file, `deno run/test -A --watch main.ts` and start importing the server from std. Yes, you can do pretty much anything in anything, but for me, Deno lets me start up faster. Oh, and we're not getting to the cross-platform build yet.

neya 4y ago

> 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 Javascript has a wider adoption than others is because it’s forced upon us. Browsers understand just Javascript to display web pages, period. Doesn’t make it the best because of that reason. I say this as an experienced IT consultant managing a wide array of projects over my career across industries. You know what usually bites me when I touch code that has not been touched for 6 months (usually a late contract renewal)? It’s not my Elixir or Ruby code that’s running on autopilot. It’s the stupid Javascript with its Node based dependencies all failing randomly in each direction just because some developer used a library for something trivial they could have written themselves or super likely because Babel or Webpack decided to change their config files so my entire JS pipeline breaks. JS is a language full of patchwork and its entire ecosystem, more so - it certainly has gotten better over the years. If it works for you, then great. But it’s a far cry from a “one solution for everything that’s better than everything else”. Personally, I use Coffeescript. It has been a breeze from all aspects.

MarquesMa 4y ago
> You want to sell Javascript based solutions, go for it. But don’t push this nonsense like “No language like Javascript”. The only reason Javascript has a wider adoption than others is that it’s forced upon us. It is forced upon us doesn't mean it can't be universal. On the contrary, it usually is. It's like how USD is kinda forced around the world but it's universal nonetheless.
alephnan 4y ago
> 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 touched for 6 months (usually a late contract renewal)?... It’s the stupid Javascript with its Node based dependencies all failing randomly in each direction just because some developer used a library for something trivial they could have written themselves or super likely because Babel or Webpack decided to change their config files so my entire JS pipeline breaks. 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. > Personally, I use Coffeescript. It has been a breeze from all aspects. That's a cool story, but Deno uses TypeScript so the whole JavaScript rant crumbles here. > Browsers understand just Javascript to display web pages, period. Bits like this make me feel like you're just throwing a bunch of domain-related words together and hopes something sticks. Browsers understand more than JavaScript, and JavaScript isn't the control layer for logic, which can including displaying page, but ultimately its HTML that is for displaying the web page. > I say this as an experienced IT consultant managing a wide array of projects over my career across industries. 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

oofbey 4y ago

JavaScript is popular because of browsers not because it is in any way a good language. Name another popular language with half its quirks. WASM will eventually spell the end of JavaScript’s hegemony as it becomes easier to build web apps in other languages. So good luck Deno. You’re betting on a sinking ship.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
C++ _easily_ has many if not more quriks than JS. There have been over a half dozen major revisions of the language since ~1988. Each one added in sometimes dramatic ways new syntax or idioms that required major relearning. If you learned and used C++ in 1995 you would be a liability if thrown into a modern 2015+ C++ codebase (well a liability until you learn all the new quirks and changes in the language). You might drop into a C++ codebase from 1990 that looks more like C (it was made to be mostly backwards compatible after all), then see a codebase from 1999 that's chock full of the most cryptic template metaprogramming imagingable and complete spaghetti structure of OO "design patterns", and then see a codebase from 2010 making much more heavy use of the updated standard library and a functional style of programming. The sheer scope of C++ as a language is frightening as it requires quite deep knowledge of the parts you're using. Sometimes even deep knowledge of the history and rationale for parts of the language you're using existing. And if you screw something up you might silently introduce a major security hole, OS crash, or worse--the language gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself from. Oh and there's no standard build system, no standard package manager, no standard project layout, no standard for code formatting, documentation, etc. Everyone has their own bespoke solutions that make the JS world look amazing in contrast.
- oofbey 4y ago
  True, and, C++ is popular in that people use it. But I don't think many people really like it.

weird-eye-issue 4y ago

Got a 502, oopsies https://i.imgur.com/YvZ3sYg.png https://i.imgur.com/YvZ3sYg.png

worik 4y ago

"JavaScript is unlike other programming languages in that it is the universal scripting language." WTF? How is that even slightly true? C is the universal scripting language, in exactly the same way. Nothing happening in this space makes any sense to me.

numlock86 4y ago
There's interpreters/runtimes for C? At least that's the go-to definition for scripting languages.
- biztos 4y ago
  I think the point was merely that JavaScript is obviously not the "universal scripting language" and claiming it is demonstrates not just hubris but ignorance. That said, I have tons of little one-off utilities I launch with "go run random-thing.go" because I don't care about the second or two it takes to compile, and if C were my everyday language I'm sure I'd have a compile-and-run wrapper handy. At that point, it's effectively a scripting language, right?
  - ascorbic 4y ago
    Which scripting language has a better claim to being universal? JavaScript runs on billions of diverse systems worldwide, both browser, server and CLI.
    - worik 4y ago
      perl python lua scheme bash
      - numlock86 4y ago
        Which browsers support these?
joshxyz 4y ago
try running C in your browser lol

WuxiFingerHold 4y ago

A lot of marketing fluff and exaggerations but the core of is very interesting. Combine this with a real serverless Postgres like https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/ and this could indeed change a lot the way mainstream apps are build an deployed.

Drblessing 4y ago

Is there a NextJS-like framework for Deno?

ascorbic 4y ago
There's Fresh, but you can run also Next.js on Deno (and Remix and SvelteKit and Astro and Hydrogen and Qwik and 11ty and SolidJS and more). We do it at Netlify. See the examples linked here: https://docs.netlify.com/netlify-labs/experimental-features/edge-functions/#use-cases https://docs.netlify.com/netlify-labs/experimental-features/...
o_m 4y ago
Remix supports Deno on Deno Deploy: https://remix.run/docs/en/v1/api/conventions#serverbuildtarget https://remix.run/docs/en/v1/api/conventions#serverbuildtarg...

ebingdom 4y ago

> Cold start (time to first response, ms) O(100) O(1000) O(10000) Ugh, that's not how big O notation works.

dan-robertson 4y ago
On the other hand, it is how it is often used informally in speech. I would probably have written eg ~100 instead, but I easily understood what they meant.
fwg 4y ago
Yes it is. Big-O means given an arbitrary function of some complexity, it is definitely bounded by this other function from the top, i.e. that other function is always larger than our arbitrary function. f(n) \in O(n^2) means n^2 (ignoring constant factors) is always larger than f(n). If you have no polynomial elements in your O(g), then you only state the constant factor. Like in O(1). So saying Cold_start(service) \in O(100 ms) is exactly the same as saying the cold start will always be below 100 ms. It makes sense to not say they are all O(1), although strictly they are, as the interesting bit is the difference in magnitude of the constant.

shetill 4y ago

who?

quickthrower2 4y ago

Wow I had a play, within 30 seconds I had deployed their hello world. Checked devtools and it took between 30-100ms (I am not on a great internet connection, but this proves it is somewhere near me globally!). Also loving .deno.dev as a fairly nice top level domain for a blog. E.g. johnsmith.deno.dev.