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I really want to like Deno. I started to watch "just a few minutes" of their keynote (I assume it was the most recent one, this was a month or so ago) and was i

I really want to like Deno. I started to watch "just a few minutes" of their keynote (I assume it was the most recent one, this was a month or so ago) and was intrigued by it and ended up watching the whole thing. Then I went to go play with it add... I ran into odd compatibility issues (no, I don't remember them, I'm sorry) and tried Bun and everything "just worked". I'm sure Bun is not perfect but so far, every one-off script I've thrown at it has "just worked" which is amazing for me since I greatly prefer to work in TypeScript and (until recently with the type-stripping stuff in node) that was way harder than it needed to be. If I never see an error about how I should change my "type" to "module" only to do it have it complain about 10 other things I will die happy. I love Javascript, I love TypeScript, I feel like I'm primed to love Deno but all the parts of it felt half-baked. The comments in this article about things like Fresh and K/V store ring very true. I kept looking for things like "What backend framework should I use?" and the answers were all over the place and not very mature options. It felt like I was building on sand. I hope I'm 100% wrong, I hope deno turns it around, I want more things like deno to exist, but the closing of data centers is not encouraging.

davidkwast 2y ago
Maybe Deno is the PyPy (from Python) to the JavaScript
- pjmlp 2y ago
  To me Bun and Deno are more like egcs.
dimal 2y ago
I feel like they bit off more than they can chew. I want to like it, too. But they’re trying to create a whole new JavaScript ecosystem from the ground up, and a lot of it depends on maintaining a seamless compatibility layer that’s always a moving target. It’s not just node. They have Fresh, which depends on Preact, which is a compatibility layer over the React API. Why? To save a few K on bundle size? They have JSR. Why? The sales pitch is great: Typescript that just works. But in my experience, it didn’t “just work”. I tried building something with Fresh and ran into issues immediately. I bailed out.
travisgriggs 2y ago
> I love Javascript, I love TypeScript… Respect. Everyone gets to love something. I’ve been through enough iterations of technology that I don’t attach like that anymore. But I find it interesting when people express these opinions. Can you share a little context? What background you’re from, industry your working in, what motivates your love?
- Shorn 2y ago
  It's interesting to me anyone could honestly like them both. Personally, I loathe javascript but love typescript.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Since ES6 it isn't that bad. On my hobby projects I tend to use script tags directly and don't bother with any of the build headaches I have at work, hobby projects are supposed to be fun.
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    I guess when I say I love Javascript I really mean I love the platform that JS has provided for Typescript. Can't have TS without JS and for all it's warts I loved learning/using JS (way before TS came out). Now that TS exists I never write plain JS except a few old legacy pages here and there.
- dwaltrip 2y ago
  There’s a million blog posts out there on this topic, if you are curious. Your questions are a bit probing and feel dangerously close to flamebait.
  - travisgriggs 2y ago
    Sigh. It wasn’t meant to be. There are indeed many and varied opinions on JS. This person seemed particularly exuberant. I was curious. I put the respect in to try and convey “safe to answer”. It appears I failed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
Yea I had the misfortune of thinking I could write it in deno because deno was available in the extra repository of archlinux whereas bun wasn't Big mistake. my project really required me to have so many custom deno commands like deno run -A --sloppyimports and so much more and that it was really causing me to be unable to find previous history of commands (something which I have in zshrc because of it for some reason) I really regret not using bun for it. Bun is faster & to me it doesn't matter that much because deno is boasting that it can run nextjs, well quite frankly, I don't use nextjs, I use sveltekit which works on literally every single platform. And also instead of deno cloud, I personally prefer cloudflare workers with sveltekit. It has been a breeze of mind to be honest, but I am not sure if cloudflare workers is 100% compatible with nodejs/bun but my deployments have always worked for some reason.

davidkwast 2y ago

Maybe Deno is the PyPy (from Python) to the JavaScript

pjmlp 2y ago
To me Bun and Deno are more like egcs.

dimal 2y ago

I feel like they bit off more than they can chew. I want to like it, too. But they’re trying to create a whole new JavaScript ecosystem from the ground up, and a lot of it depends on maintaining a seamless compatibility layer that’s always a moving target. It’s not just node. They have Fresh, which depends on Preact, which is a compatibility layer over the React API. Why? To save a few K on bundle size? They have JSR. Why? The sales pitch is great: Typescript that just works. But in my experience, it didn’t “just work”. I tried building something with Fresh and ran into issues immediately. I bailed out.

travisgriggs 2y ago

> I love Javascript, I love TypeScript… Respect. Everyone gets to love something. I’ve been through enough iterations of technology that I don’t attach like that anymore. But I find it interesting when people express these opinions. Can you share a little context? What background you’re from, industry your working in, what motivates your love?

Shorn 2y ago
It's interesting to me anyone could honestly like them both. Personally, I loathe javascript but love typescript.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Since ES6 it isn't that bad. On my hobby projects I tend to use script tags directly and don't bother with any of the build headaches I have at work, hobby projects are supposed to be fun.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I guess when I say I love Javascript I really mean I love the platform that JS has provided for Typescript. Can't have TS without JS and for all it's warts I loved learning/using JS (way before TS came out). Now that TS exists I never write plain JS except a few old legacy pages here and there.
dwaltrip 2y ago
There’s a million blog posts out there on this topic, if you are curious. Your questions are a bit probing and feel dangerously close to flamebait.
- travisgriggs 2y ago
  Sigh. It wasn’t meant to be. There are indeed many and varied opinions on JS. This person seemed particularly exuberant. I was curious. I put the respect in to try and convey “safe to answer”. It appears I failed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Imustaskforhelp 2y ago

Yea I had the misfortune of thinking I could write it in deno because deno was available in the extra repository of archlinux whereas bun wasn't Big mistake. my project really required me to have so many custom deno commands like deno run -A --sloppyimports and so much more and that it was really causing me to be unable to find previous history of commands (something which I have in zshrc because of it for some reason) I really regret not using bun for it. Bun is faster & to me it doesn't matter that much because deno is boasting that it can run nextjs, well quite frankly, I don't use nextjs, I use sveltekit which works on literally every single platform. And also instead of deno cloud, I personally prefer cloudflare workers with sveltekit. It has been a breeze of mind to be honest, but I am not sure if cloudflare workers is 100% compatible with nodejs/bun but my deployments have always worked for some reason.