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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 ea

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.
  - erikpukinskis 4y ago
    And for the handful of routines where all-out performance is the bottleneck for your business those languages are the right tool for the job. For everything else, there’s JavaScript.
    - berkes 4y ago
      There are many areas in which JavaScript "performs" poorer than other options. Productivity, stability, maintainability, to name a few. Other languages and ecosystems are much better at that, than JavaScript. Luckily projects like typescript solve those issues, or try to.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      If there was a reason to prefer JS, sure. But it's not really any better in other respects. The only thing it has going for it is that it's forced on you on the frontend.
      - erikpukinskis 4y ago
        IMO, that’s the only reason to use JavaScript: you can have a single language application. With anything else you need a two language application. Going from one to two is a MASSSIVE increase in developer overhead. Not sure that outweighs the downsides of JavaScript, but that’s how I’d dispute your “no reason” claim.
- pull_my_finger 4y ago
  > if there was a compiler/interpreter for another language that was close to being as good as V8 Like LuaJIT that has been around longer than V8?
  - LunaSea 4y ago
    LuaJIT is fast however it misses Node.js's (or Python's) standard library and package ecosystem.
    - pull_my_finger 4y ago
      So then you pull in LuaFileSystem or LuaSocket or whatever you need. I never understood this as a huge limitation. There are plenty of very mature cross platform libraries for anything I'd grab out of node's standard libs. There's even libUV bindings (luv) which would pretty much feature match nodejs completely. Add to that LuaJITs FFI you get all of C's ecosystem as well. Batteries are helpful, but it's not like Lua is completely devoid of helpful libraries.
  - spencerchubb 4y ago
    It would be interesting to see a Deno competitor run on Lua!
- winrid 4y ago
  PHP interpreted your code for every request until recently, and it was decently fast...
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Go is as good as V8, no? [ disclaimer: i was a V8 contributor 13 years ago, and it is good, but it is not the only game in town ]
- native_samples 4y ago
  You can pretty easily argue Graal is better than V8 in many different ways. V8 is good at what it does but its ambitions are very limited. They only care about Chrome so anything Chrome doesn't need gets ignored. And JS is inherently difficult to compile to highly optimized code.
butterfly771 4y ago
History has proved the first-mover advantage. Many unreasonable places in the history of human evolution have been preserved because they did not affect survival. The best may not be widely used. Ecosystems that are large enough are easier to live to the end. The future is the future of the survivors. Js is like this.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
It's less of a problem, I think, than you think it is. In the enterprise world, Java is / was a similar de-facto standard because they paid good money for Java enterprise servers, Oracle databases, trainings, frameworks, the works. I'd rather work for a monoculture than a cowboy pick-whatever-you-want one; it's not a dichotomy, sure, but I'm aware of the latter for business continuity. You run into scaling and talent acquisition issues. Bus factor. Etc. If you as a company can say "We need a Deno developer" instead of "We need a full-stack Javascript/NodeJS/Scala/Java/Go/Rust/Erlang developer" (just to name a random array of languages) you can hire and train a lot better.

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.
- erikpukinskis 4y ago
  And for the handful of routines where all-out performance is the bottleneck for your business those languages are the right tool for the job. For everything else, there’s JavaScript.
  - berkes 4y ago
    There are many areas in which JavaScript "performs" poorer than other options. Productivity, stability, maintainability, to name a few. Other languages and ecosystems are much better at that, than JavaScript. Luckily projects like typescript solve those issues, or try to.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    If there was a reason to prefer JS, sure. But it's not really any better in other respects. The only thing it has going for it is that it's forced on you on the frontend.
    - erikpukinskis 4y ago
      IMO, that’s the only reason to use JavaScript: you can have a single language application. With anything else you need a two language application. Going from one to two is a MASSSIVE increase in developer overhead. Not sure that outweighs the downsides of JavaScript, but that’s how I’d dispute your “no reason” claim.
pull_my_finger 4y ago
> if there was a compiler/interpreter for another language that was close to being as good as V8 Like LuaJIT that has been around longer than V8?
- LunaSea 4y ago
  LuaJIT is fast however it misses Node.js's (or Python's) standard library and package ecosystem.
  - pull_my_finger 4y ago
    So then you pull in LuaFileSystem or LuaSocket or whatever you need. I never understood this as a huge limitation. There are plenty of very mature cross platform libraries for anything I'd grab out of node's standard libs. There's even libUV bindings (luv) which would pretty much feature match nodejs completely. Add to that LuaJITs FFI you get all of C's ecosystem as well. Batteries are helpful, but it's not like Lua is completely devoid of helpful libraries.
- spencerchubb 4y ago
  It would be interesting to see a Deno competitor run on Lua!
winrid 4y ago
PHP interpreted your code for every request until recently, and it was decently fast...
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Go is as good as V8, no? [ disclaimer: i was a V8 contributor 13 years ago, and it is good, but it is not the only game in town ]
native_samples 4y ago
You can pretty easily argue Graal is better than V8 in many different ways. V8 is good at what it does but its ambitions are very limited. They only care about Chrome so anything Chrome doesn't need gets ignored. And JS is inherently difficult to compile to highly optimized code.

butterfly771 4y ago

History has proved the first-mover advantage. Many unreasonable places in the history of human evolution have been preserved because they did not affect survival. The best may not be widely used. Ecosystems that are large enough are easier to live to the end. The future is the future of the survivors. Js is like this.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

It's less of a problem, I think, than you think it is. In the enterprise world, Java is / was a similar de-facto standard because they paid good money for Java enterprise servers, Oracle databases, trainings, frameworks, the works. I'd rather work for a monoculture than a cowboy pick-whatever-you-want one; it's not a dichotomy, sure, but I'm aware of the latter for business continuity. You run into scaling and talent acquisition issues. Bus factor. Etc. If you as a company can say "We need a Deno developer" instead of "We need a full-stack Javascript/NodeJS/Scala/Java/Go/Rust/Erlang developer" (just to name a random array of languages) you can hire and train a lot better.