Side note: I parse this domain name as "D-Bus hell", and I expect a rant about how Linux IPC is completely broken, then I remember that this is somebody's blog.
amelius 39 minutes ago [-]
D-Bus turned Linux into a hairy ball of microservices that breaks at the most inconvenient moments.
Had to run "dbus-launch" to send this comment.
Joker_vD 4 hours ago [-]
Wait, it's not? What is it then, "DBU shell"?
deciduously 4 hours ago [-]
David Bushell, its in his banner if you click it.
Levitating 14 minutes ago [-]
I was under the impression David just had some strong opinions on dbus.
timcobb 3 hours ago [-]
Same, I came for the dbus hell, stayed for the ...
written-beyond 5 hours ago [-]
lol, I made the same comment the last time this website was shared here.
yearesadpeople 5 hours ago [-]
I've read OP blog and writings for a time. The one takeaway - for me - is how negative/defensive the writing is. And, I'm not sure why it has to be that way.
---
Node kept doing its thing when Bun, Deno, etc. was all the rage. And I do respect Node team for trying to improve little by little. It's not an ideal runtime but, it is _trying_... and that's a positive story.
gwbas1c 2 hours ago [-]
This was the point the author lost credibility, IMO:
> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem. Nobody wants more Microsoft.
I've done a small amount of work with Node (with JavaScript), and many libraries appear to have TypeScript bindings. It "felt" like there was pressure on me to move to TypeScript. (And, my conclusion at the end of my work with Node was that the next time I do anything significant with it, I would start with TypeScript first.)
isyouaint 15 hours ago [-]
I helped Deno bring the Standard Library to v1 [as a contractor] and have always loved the team and philosophy. But these days I’m saddened by what seems to be their slow decline into obscurity. After the layoffs, there seems to be no roadmap, no comms, etc. I’m just so curious as to where they’re heading and still hope the best for it. I’ve always liked Deno more than Node and Bun.
erlend_sh 10 hours ago [-]
The saddest part is that there have surely been acquisition offers from bigger players that they declined, but given how strongly the market favors the hyperscalers and super-capitalized AI companies an acquisition might’ve been their only sensible play. You either sell or get squeezed out.
cavoirom 1 hours ago [-]
JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem is the stage of celebrities and superstars, and Deno goes the way of a boring technology, it had done many things right (ESM, battery included, all in one development tool) but it lost the spotlight. It leads me think about another technology: Unison, which is a head of the time but... not so many people understand it.
tuveson 14 hours ago [-]
> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem.
> The new deal shows Microsoft doubling down on the strategy of helping individuals and corporate developers adopt open-source software, despite its heritage of distributing products that cost money
That is.....not the way anyone I know would describe Microsoft's history with the open source movement historically.....
arcanemachiner 13 hours ago [-]
Don't worry. I'm sure Microsoft will be as good of a steward of npm and its ecosystem as they have been for GitHub.
judge2020 13 hours ago [-]
GH still has its own login system thankfully, and I can't even sign in with Microsoft or link my Linkedin profile in any way (at least from Github.com; I'm sure there's a public Linkedin-developed Github App). I'll take what I can get.
beart 12 hours ago [-]
The article is from 2020, so you may already be able to make that judgment.
IshKebab 7 hours ago [-]
They've been a great steward of GitHub. You people have no perspective. They've kept an insanely generous free tier - free private repos, free CI runners including windows and Mac! And no ads.
Name one other company that would do that.
PinkSheep 5 hours ago [-]
I too would have kept it "free" for the LLM learning corpus and the way to nudge developers towards own cloud services and infrastructure. Github Actions is the first obvious deviation from vendor agnosticism here. If it's about "they didn't make profit maximization at all costs a priority" then I agree.
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
What are you saying? It's not ok for it to be free because they're using that to encourage people to use their paid services? Uhm no shit.
And your comment about LLMs is even sillier. Not only did they buy it 5 years before LLMs became relevant, but there's nothing stopping anyone other than Microsoft from downloading all of GitHub. Look at grep.app for example.
NoahZuniga 2 hours ago [-]
node!=npm, and microsoft doesn't own the development of node.
AgentME 12 hours ago [-]
Deno is still an easy pick for me because of its built-in test-runner (deno test), linter (deno lint), and type checker (deno check). I've used many different npm packages for these things in previous projects and I have no idea what the new hotness and proper configuration is for all of these things in a new node project, so I really value the simplicity of Deno for it all. Also JSR and Deno for publishing Typescript libraries is still so much easier than setting up a Typescript node project and configuring it to publish compiled code, and it gets you documentation pages generated from your tsdoc comments too, which I never knew how to do outside of JSR.
willio58 12 hours ago [-]
The new hot lint (for me) is Oxlint. Literally a 300x speed improvement on our monorepo compared to eslint for the same ruleset. It’s amazing, especially in combination with Oxfmt instead of prettier.
rob74 9 hours ago [-]
Well, TBH being better than eslint (especially with the OCD-afflicted prettier) is a really, really low bar...
simantel 12 hours ago [-]
FWIW Node now has node:test, but yeah you still need dependencies for linting and type checking.
cavoirom 1 hours ago [-]
those features a great, but aren't what most of the people doing JS/TS care.
Not sure if the runtime should be responsible for linting of type checking.
littlecranky67 10 hours ago [-]
The hot shit is still typescript, eslint. I have been using those for more than a decade in node. For me, (deno lint) sounds like the new hot shit.
polatronics 17 minutes ago [-]
> even surpassing Deno in places
If you’re trashing Deno, it would be nice to give some examples of where node surpasses it and has not just caught up.
dzonga 5 hours ago [-]
> vibe-coding Temu Cloudflare.
this is not fair. given the amount of work going into cell-d which will make an open source self host-able workers platform.
cz at the moment there's nothing comparable to Cloudflare workers.
tietjens 4 hours ago [-]
I agree. I don't think this is anything to sneer at.
theturtletalks 14 hours ago [-]
With LLMs becoming prevalent, it seems people are “quitting” their projects more quickly. Not necessarily a bad thing, but just shows that the opportunity cost is too high right now if you’re building the wrong thing. Deno isn’t the wrong thing, but LLMs don’t reach for it and that’s a huge blow right now.
doginasuit 12 hours ago [-]
> Deno isn’t the wrong thing, but LLMs don’t reach for it and that’s a huge blow right now.
This only matters if you don't know what you are doing. LLMs can work with any tool. I'm working with a very unconventional stack and the LLM seems right at home.
chrisldgk 6 hours ago [-]
They were talking from a product/company perspective where if Deno isn’t the default runtime that the LLM chooses for you, you tend to fall into obscurity.
That’s also probably why bun, supabase and netlify have been seeing so many new users, because (at least in my case and unless instructed otherwise), vibe coded projects had a tendency to push me in that direction.
theturtletalks 4 hours ago [-]
I have a tech stack that I use and yes I tell AI to use it. But if I’m starting a new project and AI is doing the scaffolding, I’ll just let it decide what to use. It uses Bun a lot of the times. Many people will just go with what AI chooses, right or not.
da02 6 hours ago [-]
Which stack is that?
NetOpWibby 10 hours ago [-]
LLMs don't reach for it because the frontier companies don't have it as the default. I've instructed Claude to NOT use React (use SvelteKit), NOT use Node (use Deno or Bun), among other things.
The industry defaults are trash but it is what it is.
patadura 7 hours ago [-]
They would rather have some unreadable python scripts and vendoring than using a package manager in a c++ project...
6 hours ago [-]
mahboi 8 hours ago [-]
It also really really wants to use Gradle if you're making a Bukkit plugin, even though you really only need the JDK.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
The only reason to ever touch it, are Android projects. I try to stay Gradle clean as much as possible.
mahboi 16 minutes ago [-]
Same. The Gradle setup it was making was insanely complicated, then the Gradle-free script I forced it to make was very simple. There's no way I would've used Gradle without the LLM either.
cpursley 9 hours ago [-]
Oh man they all reach for the nextjs dumpster fire. Every single vibe coded app is that stack. At least many are backed with supabase (Postgres is a same choice).
NetOpWibby 12 minutes ago [-]
I enjoy LLMs as much as the next guy but man, having a baseline of knowledge about coding goes a long way.
cpursley 1 hours ago [-]
postgres is a sane choice, I can't type
adamddev1 10 hours ago [-]
This is part of how LLMs are hurting progress. People are moved away from things like StackOverflow or new projects where they pose and answer questions with real people, or create novel things, and pushed more and more to whatever answers or solutions the LLMs will spit out for them.
balder1991 50 minutes ago [-]
Also the less you know, the more your solution will be the same as everyone else’s.
evbogue 2 hours ago [-]
I just throw Deno into my agents file and it gets installed in whatever environment I'm working in.
However, the truth is that writing isomorphic javascript programs in the age of agentic coding is much less important to me than it was a few years ago.
sheept 10 hours ago [-]
I added a wrapper script around Deno to my agent’s allowlist to take advantage of its permissions system, and instructed it to use Deno instead of Python or bash commands. It’s worked pretty well.
lukan 13 hours ago [-]
"Deno isn’t the wrong thing, but LLMs don’t reach for it and that’s a huge blow right now"
Well, in my case I suddenly had deno installed, while letting run fable in auto mode, even node was already there and I had to look up what deno was. "Ah, that node replacement."
mahboi 8 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't be an issue. Like LLMs don't reach for uv, but they will if you make it clear you want to use uv.
lionkor 8 hours ago [-]
> LLMs don’t reach for it
Please excuse my language, but that's only the case if you're a complete imbecile and can't write a for loop to save your life.
An LLM doesn't "reach" for anything, because you tell it what to do. You go "use this tool, to do that thing, in this way, here's a bunch of written guidance on how exactly to do that, and if you run into issues ask me". Any other use is glorified copy-paste slop code and will end up with a worse codebase than if you let an egomaniac run amok on a single codebase for 20 years.
frumiousirc 6 hours ago [-]
You are ignoring that prompting is fractal all the way down to the scale where the human writes everything by hand.
If I say, "start a C++ package skeleton" I'm getting CMake, not waf, make, bjam, or whatever. If I state the build system, then I'm still getting some package layout drawn from the training distribution. If I specify that, I'm still getting snake_case or CamelCase or whatever naming convention, drawn from the training distribution. If I specify that, etc etc.
It is distribution sampling all the way down.
So, yes, literally LLMs ARE reaching for "it".
PinkSheep 5 hours ago [-]
This brings up the question how much weight these people have, if don't even know what their solution should be based on.
NamlchakKhandro 4 hours ago [-]
sounds like you don't know about agent skills yet.
ghtbircshotbe 3 hours ago [-]
If I remember correctly, using nvm on Debian to install the newest version of node silently appended lines to my bashrc. Friends don't silently append lines to my bashrc.
chrisweekly 3 hours ago [-]
nvm is not node. and there are better options for managing node versions (eg mise).
gandreani 2 hours ago [-]
Or fnm! I use it and it's lives up to the name (it's much faster)
tiborsaas 8 hours ago [-]
I'm building on Deno for the past 2 years and I have no regrets. It still delivers me why I picked it over node. Less config, less packages to install, good DX.
raspace 13 hours ago [-]
Turns out the 'boring enterprise runtime' spent its time actually shipping stability while everyone else was chasing the next shiny runtime hype cycle.
mahboi 8 hours ago [-]
It's great that they developed alternatives to Node, I was just getting annoyed with all the users trying to bait in more users like "why don't you use [Deno/Bun], it's completely compatible" when it's not. Same with all the Python interpreters besides CPython.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
The ones that actually care about JIT in the box are attractive because of that, thankfully CPython is finally taking having a JIT in the box seriously.
It also doesn't work properly if you disable JavaScript. On my phone, I can't scroll.
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
But why?
fr2029 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fastball 16 hours ago [-]
I know Bun is kinda not the fan favorite right now with the Anthropic acquisition and the Rust re-write drama and such, but on every one of the dimensions listed in this article, I like Bun better than either Node or Deno.
vlz 12 hours ago [-]
The author gives his (non-technical) reason for not using bun here:
Is there any kind of geeky service that lists the range of political views held by the founders of all popular software products? Otherwise, maybe half the software on my computer was made by fascists, and I don't even know it.
For example, Linux — how fascist, communist, or monarchist is it? I'd also be interested to know which NVIDIA drivers are more supportive of the LGBT community—the open-source ones or the proprietary ones?
I had never even thought about this until your comment.
voxelghost 8 hours ago [-]
without having the full background here. This feels like a very valid reason
mrighele 6 hours ago [-]
I like Bun too, I think its ergonomics are much better. If you are writing a front end you can produce the final output without an external bundled. Similarly if you are working on a backend TS project (less of a problem these days but transpiling TS used to be full of gotchas depending on your dependencies) . You can even just build a single binary to deploy in your container. Useful for command line tools to (they come out a bit big, but for personal use is not an issue)
Muromec 15 hours ago [-]
I use bun for the sole reason of it running perfectly on riscv64, while void zero is sleeping and not providing vite/tsdown/oxwhatver builds for it.
mring33621 9 minutes ago [-]
Are you using riscv64 in the cloud or desktop?
i'm very interested in RISC-V and would love to read anything you can provide.
Thanks!
shard972 15 hours ago [-]
Bun is awesome. It feels great these days to start with bun or convert a nodejs app over and reduce deps down, sometimes to 0.
Ive just gone all in, no more mega bash scripts that constantly bug out on the silliest problems whenever you try to do anything complex involving a list data type.
It just feels like its something you can pretty much always bend towards what you need without needing to breakout into another language and I'm keen to see some of the new performance stuff their continuing to work on.
jazzypants 3 hours ago [-]
Why did you use "mega bash scripts" with Node? That seems completely unrelated to your choice of JavaScript engine.
jesse_dot_id 6 hours ago [-]
Node has felt fine to me for quite awhile. There was a brief time where it felt a little slow comparatively but it's been mostly ironed out. They tend to address their problems decently fast.
The Internet loves to adopt a new shiny thing, try to convince everybody else it's the right decision because it's the decision they made, and then get quiet about it. (i.e. they went back.)
real_faxenoff 2 hours ago [-]
I was impressed by bun from the very beginning, and that continued until I needed to use native GPU calls. I had to switch to Node.js subprocesses.
When comparing Bun and Node.js for my tasks, I keep finding more advantages in Bun’s optimizations. I'll handle GPU processes through BFFI. Node.js is also prone to unstable memory behavior with native processes, so it doesn’t make sense to use it as an extra layer.
For those looking for stability, Node.js is definitely the better choice.
laurencerowe 2 hours ago [-]
Bun’s BFFI is very similar to Deno’s FFI. I believe the approach originated in LuaJIT.
benburton 10 hours ago [-]
As a casual both Bun and Deno user, I have generally preferred Bun to Deno unless sandboxing is a concern.
I'm not quite sure I've seen a runtime, JavaScript or otherwise, that has the same network-level gating that deno enforces. Making an allowlist of addresses the default seems like it needs to be table stakes in the agentic era.
stuaxo 8 hours ago [-]
Oh, I always thought this was the blog of someone that had spent a lot of time developing using DBUS
torben-friis 5 hours ago [-]
>My (ancient) experience with NVM and NPM hasn’t been stellar. I heard Fast Node Manager (FNM) was better to switch Node versions. Obviously I roll bleeding-edge but I have client projects that demand stability.
Why would just switching the binary version in path be something deep enough to have a preference?
Honest question, I'm trying to think how can the experience be good or bad in a command that's just "use 3.2". Isn't the whole thing a switch, a state variable and maybe handling the download if there required version isn't available?
hombre_fatal 2 hours ago [-]
nvm added like 3+ seconds to my new shell startup, and one of the maintainers defended it with "so what, how often do you open new terminal windows?"
One thing I've learned about tech is that you can never assume something is too boring for opinions.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
I never left node.
The thing with being around for a while is the ability to seat on the porch, watching the adventurers' caravans pass by, once upon a traveller in one of those, now only the ones that actually make the way back into town matter to actually have a second look and talk to the strangers.
mahboi 8 hours ago [-]
This is making me feel 1337 for being too lazy to even consider leaving Node. Same thing with Log4j vs System.out.println.
duesabati 5 hours ago [-]
node is a big part of what is wrong in the JS ecosystem, is literally the example of "LLMs actually write better code than the average programmer". Deno on the other hand is striving to make better decisions and try as much as they can to make the right contribution to the ecosystem. I can agree that lately as a company it has lost a bit of direction, but I would rather see NodeJS die than Deno.
samier-steward 31 minutes ago [-]
Upvoting because of meme reference.
BrunoBernardino 3 hours ago [-]
I _still_ prefer Deno over Node but I can't say that will be the reality in the near future. Once TypeScript _just works_ (instead of striping types) and the security improvements land by default, I'll probably switch back.
Alarms started ringing for me when they went for backwards support and focused heavily on that, when Bun was already on that route.
Sad but true.
space_ghost 2 hours ago [-]
> instead of striping types
That's what Deno does too, tho. Typescript is designed to work that way.
jerleth 11 hours ago [-]
I am not sure about deno not being innovative - I've recently started using deno for it's new desktop app support only (https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/)
cyh555 9 hours ago [-]
this is being innovative? nevermind, not gonna argue on that
but some AI projects have been using deno desktop to run python via pyodide locally, I couldn't complain since it's like a sandbox to them
solarkraft 15 hours ago [-]
Oh look, we’re consolidating again. My only gripe with it was that it wouldn’t directly run Typescript. Other than that it just felt a little ... antiquated.
Bun seems popular too, what would be reasons to choose it?
norman784 9 hours ago [-]
The only reason to choose Node is because it's boring, is a long lived project and I think it will outlive Bun and Deno.
asutekku 11 hours ago [-]
Bun is much much more lighter than node or deno. If you don't mind the controversy around the rust rewrite, it's objectively the better option in most cases.
nananana9 11 hours ago [-]
A month before the rewrite I was hitting soundness bugs on fairly trivial JS code. I remember right, under HMR re-exports of module variables caused a snapshot, and importers of the reexport saw stale values.
I reported it, watched robobun write an unhinged +300 -0 patch which quickly got LGTM'd and merged.
I hope now that we've moved past AGI and into the ASI era things are better.
lobofta 8 hours ago [-]
I made a fairly straight forward webapp with Bun and let Claude check whether it was actually better than Node. Nope, Node consumed less memory and used about the same CPU as Bun. I didn't switch, because it costs tokens, but Node's reputation seem to be based on its legacy more than on today's use.
jazzypants 3 hours ago [-]
"much much more lighter"? What does that even mean?
nchmy 2 hours ago [-]
You know exactly what it means. You're just being a pedantic ass to someone for whom English is not their first language
Ps to the original poster. I screw things like this up in my 2nd language all the time.
"more" and "-er" are sort of redundant. You could say
More light (but this is just awkward - you'd just say lighter).
Much lighter gives an extra degree of lightness than lighter.
Much much lighter even moreso. There's nothing wrong with saying it like this in an informal context like this, but it would generally be better to use words like significantly, vastly, enormously, slightly, a bit, considerably etc to modify the degree of "lighter"
Any LLM could explain the nuances of all of this in much much more detail (this actually makes sense, because detail is not -er).
English is difficult, but dont let that stop you - it is easy to communicate effectively with even a low degree of proficiency, when the other person is acting in good faith.
jazzypants 2 hours ago [-]
No, I am literally asking you what you meant because I don't understand you. Are you talking about runtime memory usage?
nchmy 58 minutes ago [-]
im not the person who you initially replied to... But surely it is self-evident what they meant by lighter (even if we dont know precisely what they were referring to) - CPU, ram etc... This is something that is always discussed when it comes to node vs bun vs deno
jazzypants 39 minutes ago [-]
Well, no. It's not self-evident even in your description of why you think it would be. CPU vs RAM is exactly the kind of distinction that I was trying to delineate. I've been benchmarking heavily lately as I'm working on a library, and anything that heavily depends on Crypto slightly favors Node. Bun admittedly does win on most things like JSON serialization & pure request/second throughput. However, it's just not clear cut enough to say that it is "much, much lighter" categorically.
wetpaws 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
chrysoprace 15 hours ago [-]
I wanted Deno to succeed to have a single standardised toolchain, but with Deno having its own APIs you'd effectively have to architect your application to be a "Deno app" and it created two different ecosystems. The best way to make your app portable would be to use the provided Node APIs, cutting a lot of the value from Deno.
Naitronbomb 14 hours ago [-]
> Why? Just strip the types bro, I know you can! Let me sign a deal with the devil!
> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem. Nobody wants more Microsoft.
The reason Node disallows this has nothing to do with TypeScript being owned by Microsoft, it's because there's no guarantee the TSConfig settings used in the library you're pulling in match the ones in your project. A mismatch would mean you would get type errors inside the library code (assuming you're doing some form of type-checking in your application, otherwise what's the point of even using TypeScript).
> No TypeScript packages mean I need to find the latest churnware slop to bundle my stuff.
There are other advantages to bundling, but it's not strictly necessary if all you care about is publishing TS on NPM. Declaration files solve the problem by supplying the resolved types of the publicly exposed identifiers. Also has the added advantage of not locking out plain JS consumers.
whilenot-dev 10 hours ago [-]
> A mismatch would mean you would get type errors inside the library code
Yes, but your TypeScript code has to be checked against the libraries in node_modules, and it is significantly costlier to check against implementation files (the .ts/.mts files) than the produced declaration files (the .d.ts files).
whilenot-dev 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, that's all correct, of course a performance hit would be noticeable if thousands of dependencies would need to be checked additionally.
OP is talking about type stripping nonetheless, and I'd put type stripping into the same ballpark as reading ambient declarations, performance wise.
zarzavat 9 hours ago [-]
Type stripping cannot ignore tsconfig.
TypeScript has different semantics depending on settings in tsconfig e.g. useDefineForClassFields
whilenot-dev 8 hours ago [-]
Type stripping can and does ignore tsconfig.json files, from the provided link:
> Node.js ignores tsconfig.json files and therefore features that depend on settings within tsconfig.json, such as paths or converting newer JavaScript syntax to older standards, are intentionally unsupported.
Of course import aliases and such features would break.
zarzavat 5 hours ago [-]
That's for running your own code. Not for running other people's code.
whilenot-dev 4 hours ago [-]
I presume you didn't get the "Let me sign a deal with the devil!"-part OP mentioned in TFA then.
Amekedl 5 hours ago [-]
Literally left when deno 2.9 is at its best place it has ever been.
Now just deno install everything and even desktop works amazingly well.
I'm curious though: for people still choosing Deno today, what is the one thing Node still doesn't give you?
notnullorvoid 4 hours ago [-]
There is no "one thing", there's many things, the top of the list being:
- packages in workspaces can be used as dependencies without compilation (node's type stripping doesn't support this)
- a good permissions model for limiting access to system fs, net, etc.
- native WebGPU support (including building a windowed app without a web view)
- desktop gui builds that allow using Chromium embedded or WebView
- built-in linter, benchmark, coverage, etc.
MrJohz 4 hours ago [-]
> - packages in workspaces can be used as dependencies without compilation (node's type stripping doesn't support this)
Node does support this! Although it may depend on exactly you link the packages within a workspace — I use `pnpm` and it Just Works™. Because NodeJS looks at the resolved symlink to decide whether a project is in `node_modules` or not, if the symlink resolves to a package in the workspace, then NodeJS will do type stripping as normal.
In fairness, the documentation is very unspecific about this, so I just had to try it out and see what happens, but it does work.
I think NodeJS also has coverage these days, although I could be wrong there.
tehbeard 7 hours ago [-]
Sandboxing and being more aligned with web standards, though admittedly on the latter I haven't checked back in on node with to see if there's been a push towards having the same tools as the browser engines instead of import('garys-crypto') etc
savolai 8 hours ago [-]
Security, as outlined by OP?
lloydatkinson 8 hours ago [-]
I reluctantly do anything with JS/TS but if I have to, I'll pick Deno because I'm sick of needing to install a dozen dependencies which then require their own thousands of dependencies.
Even if I pick modern tooling, say Biome for linting and formatting, Vite for bundling and handling the build, Vitest for unit testing, and finally TypeScript.
Once that's done, it's then remembering the right values needed in package.json and tsconfig.json to do the right thing and Just Work TM. It's 2026 and all this slop still assumes I don't want ES modules.
I could spend a whole morning on this bullshit. With Deno, I don't have to.
I always contrast that with my preferred languages, like C#/.NET. Project setup takes literally a few minutes. Deno and .NET have that in common, there is a single CLI for it.
The Deno JSR/STD thing also has a whole collection of libraries and data structures I'd otherwise need to get from NPM.
Aldipower 4 hours ago [-]
I have more than one friend.
lioeters 1 hours ago [-]
Linguistically promiscuous omniglot.
austin-cheney 16 hours ago [-]
I want to run my node project on Deno for performance testing, but Deno has problems when executing OpenSSL in a child process.
NietTim 7 hours ago [-]
Nothing says “mature ecosystem” like migrating to a different runtime every few years.
flossly 3 hours ago [-]
So glad I have my backend on the JVM and in Kotlin.
> There is no reason to use the Deno runtime today.
LMAO okay bro.
With Deno I get TypeScript by default, security, a package manager that isn't riddled with nonsense and a dated UI, and I can compile my APIs to a single executable. No way am I going back to Node but then again, this ain't my blog post.
sysguest 8 hours ago [-]
+ deno's file-system permission model is the answer to recent malicious npm packages fiasco:
"deny access to ~/.ssh and other important folders" --> that alone would likely have 99.99999% sterilized most "hacks"
NamlchakKhandro 4 hours ago [-]
nvm? fnm? what is this? 1998 ?
get with the program and be awesome with mise
seer 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the future of all three is mode bun and deno, their original goal has always been to be able to code in one language across frontend and backend, and typescript itself is a hell of a good language too.
But now that people seldom even look at the code, does it even matter? Our shared language now is English - across tests, frontend, backend, product briefs and design systems.
I have written a crap ton of node code before, because I liked it, but now I do everything in specialized stacks where each tech is chosen to best fit its environment. Backend - use Go, frontend - react/svelte/custom ,game simulation code - C#.
I just debate what would be best fit with an agent, do a few pilots to prove it and just go. Languages I’ve never coded in are super fast to execute - just insist on following best practice, modern conventions and do some spot checks against o(n) problems, architecture and parallelism - and it works, and vibe coded codebase with strict linting rules vastly outperforms fine tuned code in a shared language (node).
I honestly don’t see a bright future for them, and tbh I was surprised at Claude’s migration _to_ bun - why not just make the jump to something like ocamel that would let their agents have even more performance, context and linting tools, but I guess if they did it once the will do it again when they feel like it.
jongjong 11 hours ago [-]
It's great that we now have 3 major JS server environments: Node.js, Deno and Bun. The competition keeps them all in check.
Although I was keen to get involved in Deno in the beginning and I'm a fan of Ryan Dahl, I just couldn't shake my preference for vanilla JavaScript; it was already the case before LLMs took over, but now even more so after LLMs. But I like that Deno is an option which users of my open source projects can use.
That said, Deno deserves the credit for making TypeScript as painless as possible. Juggling different Node.js and tsc versions and tsconfig versions was a major pain in the neck. I like how Deno forces a specific TypeScript version. None of that nonsense.
bitwize 11 hours ago [-]
TypeScript is, objectively, the superior option—especially in the presence of LLMs, because the type safety is incredibly useful as a first-line eval to ensure that what the LLM spits out is sound in terms of data inputs and outputs. Strong static typing is an absolute must for building anything bigger than trivial systems.
jongjong 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know what kind of LLMs you're using but mine (Claude) has never once in 6 months got the type incorrect; neither with JavaScript nor TypeScript. So what's the point of type safety if it never gets the type wrong?
All the LLM issues I face are related to incorrect priorities, choosing the wrong tradeoffs, UX and UI flaws or incorrect assumption about requirements.
Why would I want to fill up my context window with useless type annotations and waste tokens generating them? Just like I don't want to be distracted thinking about types when I code, I don't want my LLM to be distracted by them either. Also, I don't want to waste time waiting for the transpiler to build. I don't use bundling nowadays - Not necessary if I use plain JS; instead I preload all my frontend libraries and distribute them individually; better for caching and they still download in parallel. I don't have to invalidate the entire bundle cache just because I updated one script.
Also, I don't want my LLM to generate over-engineered enterprise code. My priority is to get stuff done, not achieve job security.
xenophonf 5 hours ago [-]
> Strong static typing is an absolute must for building anything bigger than trivial systems
I was under the impression that TypeScript is only statically typed, not strongly typed, too. Am I mistaken?
jayar95 2 hours ago [-]
In casual convo, I often hear strong typing conflated with static typing. Its generally fine unless im being pedantic for sport. Typescript has a stronger typing system than javascript, but depending on your audience, some might not consider typescript a strongly typed language because of things like `any`, type assertions, and lack of runtime guarantees to name a few
victor_pudeyev 3 hours ago [-]
No Typescript
> Why? Just strip the types bro, I know you can!
Since when is it acceptable to make everyone else un-pollute his code?
elendilm 15 hours ago [-]
I never found Deno compelling enough compared to Node.
Bun was promising, but as long as they don't fix their http GET implementation to accept the request body, its broken for me.
Note: Many real world tools like Elasticsearch's GET /_search with a JSON query DSL is one example. It breaks Axios. Many custom infrastructure tools expect it.
Advertising as node compatible and having this breaking change is undesirable. Hope it gets fixed soon.
HumanOstrich 14 hours ago [-]
You shouldn't be sending a body with a GET request. Sounds like your code is broken.
elendilm 13 hours ago [-]
No. There are use cases for GET with body. Curl allows it. Node allows it. Bun doesn't.
chiffaa 12 hours ago [-]
There may be use-cases (and the RFC allows ignoring the SHOULD clause with enough reasoning), but GET does not have a request body as per specification, and a LOT of things drop it because of that (most notably - nginx! Also applies to HAProxy and Apache HTTP server afaik, but also a bunch of load balancers)
ericlewis 13 hours ago [-]
no.
elendilm 13 hours ago [-]
Wrong.
Hint: Elasticsearch, GraphQL, Axios, etc..
a57721 11 hours ago [-]
GraphQL uses POST for queries.
elendilm 10 hours ago [-]
Many GraphQL clients/libraries use GET with body to workaround hitting URL query limitations like length, etc.
Spec is not the same as compatibility.
pipe01 3 hours ago [-]
How would you hit URL query limitations when putting your GraphQL query in the POST request's body?
elendilm 50 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
zahlman 14 hours ago [-]
Enabling the GET implementation to "accept the request body" would literally be the opposite of fixing it. The broken thing here is your expectation. You are looking for POST (or possibly PUT).
ButlerianJihad 14 hours ago [-]
It was funny a few years ago, when I had to grade students answering a quiz about web services. There was a question about which components were necessary for a valid GET request. The required answer was a list of 4-5 components, such as the "GET" verb, the URI, the HTTP version, etc.
And it was rather controversial that some listed a body as necessary for a GET request, and doing my research I came to find out that a "request body" was often quite undesirable and perhaps contrary to the RFC standards, and sending a "body" in a GET could result in undefined or unpredictable behavior. But it's all in good fun.
elendilm 13 hours ago [-]
You would be surprised how many technologies expect GET with a body. In practical backend engineering, tools like Elasticsearch, GraphQL, complex query engines, and legacy internal APIs rely on GET with a body every day. Apparently even axios messes up on curl GET requests with a body as mentioned in the associated github issue.
Perhaps the broken thing might be how you expect existing softwares to break so that your expectation can be satisfied. You should look at GET more closely.
There is a reason curl allows to send GET requests with a body. There is a reason node allows to receive GET requests with a body.
pdpi 13 hours ago [-]
A request body in a GET is not standard HTTP. Refusing to handle non-standard requests might be inconvenient, but it's an eminently defensible choice.
I understand why you'd want it, and that's why RFC10008 introduces QUERY as a GET-with-body alternative.
what 12 hours ago [-]
Technically every http method can have a body? But the specification says the semantics are undefined on get and any compliant implementation is free to ignore it.
elendilm 1 hours ago [-]
Or any compliant implementation is free to not ignore it like istio/envoy, infrastructure tooling, etc.
What is the use of spec adherence if it leads to unusable/broken applications.
elendilm 10 hours ago [-]
QUERY, added in 2026, does not resolve existing or legacy applications.
Sticking to RFC is one thing.
Advertising as node compatible is completely different altogether. Many people cannot see the difference.
Atleast a flag would suffice as that would ensure existing infrastructure tooling doesn't break while keeping the RFC spec folks happy.
jazzypants 3 hours ago [-]
I can't speak for any of these other technologies, but no part of the GraphQL spec requires GET requests to have bodies. The spec is clear about how to use query strings instead.
As I have noted elsewhere here in this thread, spec saying one thing has nothing to do with how many libraries implement something. If the libraries are critical and provide value, then no matter how much you scream for your adherence to the spec, people will use it and depend on it.
The QUERY method is a step in the right direction but it came too late.
zja 14 hours ago [-]
They just implement the fetch api from the web, does the fetch api allow get’s to have a body?
elendilm 13 hours ago [-]
Node allows it. Curl allows. Not having it is a breaking change and undesirable for node compatibility.
dullcrisp 13 hours ago [-]
If you need bug-for-bug node compatibility you should be using node.
elendilm 10 hours ago [-]
Your "bug-for-bug" compatibility ensures Axios, Elasticsearch, many GraphQL implementations, etc. works. Hence I will use node as mentioned in my original comment.
You should use bun :)
what 12 hours ago [-]
A body is technically allowed on any http request but it doesn’t mean anything on a get, a server is free to ignore it, anything in the middle is free to strip it, etc.
elendilm 1 hours ago [-]
And yet many don't, Istio/Envoy for example. There are enough usable applications that utilize it that ignoring the body comes with a cost.
lloydatkinson 8 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping now this is the end of this guys constant hate posting about Deno. What a negativity fountain.
Thank you! Never researched it before. It's a pretty wholesome story that he ended up with two friends.
massimodeluisa 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
webbrainiac 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
singh_abinashi 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
9 hours ago [-]
debo_ 15 hours ago [-]
You need better friends
computerdork 11 hours ago [-]
haha! Speak for yourself, but software never judges you or cancels on you at the last minute when you're supposed to meet up at the bar. "Friends," sheesh! :)
verdverm 9 hours ago [-]
It's going to be a negative feedback loop
1. people choosing the ai companion for the frictionless relationship
2. people losing the skills needed for real life human relatioships
moralestapia 15 hours ago [-]
Node is really good, and whatever thing that comes out outside of it will eventually be engulfed by it. Node is the safe bet :).
bhavikjadav 13 hours ago [-]
Love the site!
jeffyaw 13 hours ago [-]
if you want to try a new runtime oam.js is focused on TypeScript & MCP servers.
talkingtab 3 hours ago [-]
"Just strip the types bro"
In my opinion TypeScript is not a feature. Why? 90% of the benefit of TypeScript can be obtained by using `foo({duck, clock})` pattern. And at 90% of the cost and time. TypeScript, like Java, is beneficial in situations where an error is catastrophic. That is not my situation nor the situation of what 90% of programmers?
So to the bro who wrote the otherwise interesting article I say "Just strip the types bro". You can do it!! You like it? You do it!
[Rant of course, but if you had wasted as much of your life writing types in Java you would probably rant as well. Recipe thinking sigh.]
relativeadv 3 hours ago [-]
> "what’s left are tweeting AI fantasies and vibe-coding Temu Cloudflare"
sick burn. can't say i disagree though.
Rendered at 16:14:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Had to run "dbus-launch" to send this comment.
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Node kept doing its thing when Bun, Deno, etc. was all the rage. And I do respect Node team for trying to improve little by little. It's not an ideal runtime but, it is _trying_... and that's a positive story.
> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem. Nobody wants more Microsoft.
I've done a small amount of work with Node (with JavaScript), and many libraries appear to have TypeScript bindings. It "felt" like there was pressure on me to move to TypeScript. (And, my conclusion at the end of my work with Node was that the next time I do anything significant with it, I would start with TypeScript first.)
Bad news (well not news, this happened a while ago): https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/16/microsoft-github-agrees-...
That is.....not the way anyone I know would describe Microsoft's history with the open source movement historically.....
Name one other company that would do that.
And your comment about LLMs is even sillier. Not only did they buy it 5 years before LLMs became relevant, but there's nothing stopping anyone other than Microsoft from downloading all of GitHub. Look at grep.app for example.
Not sure if the runtime should be responsible for linting of type checking.
If you’re trashing Deno, it would be nice to give some examples of where node surpasses it and has not just caught up.
this is not fair. given the amount of work going into cell-d which will make an open source self host-able workers platform.
cz at the moment there's nothing comparable to Cloudflare workers.
This only matters if you don't know what you are doing. LLMs can work with any tool. I'm working with a very unconventional stack and the LLM seems right at home.
That’s also probably why bun, supabase and netlify have been seeing so many new users, because (at least in my case and unless instructed otherwise), vibe coded projects had a tendency to push me in that direction.
The industry defaults are trash but it is what it is.
However, the truth is that writing isomorphic javascript programs in the age of agentic coding is much less important to me than it was a few years ago.
Well, in my case I suddenly had deno installed, while letting run fable in auto mode, even node was already there and I had to look up what deno was. "Ah, that node replacement."
Please excuse my language, but that's only the case if you're a complete imbecile and can't write a for loop to save your life.
An LLM doesn't "reach" for anything, because you tell it what to do. You go "use this tool, to do that thing, in this way, here's a bunch of written guidance on how exactly to do that, and if you run into issues ask me". Any other use is glorified copy-paste slop code and will end up with a worse codebase than if you let an egomaniac run amok on a single codebase for 20 years.
If I say, "start a C++ package skeleton" I'm getting CMake, not waf, make, bjam, or whatever. If I state the build system, then I'm still getting some package layout drawn from the training distribution. If I specify that, I'm still getting snake_case or CamelCase or whatever naming convention, drawn from the training distribution. If I specify that, etc etc.
It is distribution sampling all the way down.
So, yes, literally LLMs ARE reaching for "it".
https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-09-10T12:08Z/
For example, Linux — how fascist, communist, or monarchist is it? I'd also be interested to know which NVIDIA drivers are more supportive of the LGBT community—the open-source ones or the proprietary ones?
I had never even thought about this until your comment.
i'm very interested in RISC-V and would love to read anything you can provide.
Thanks!
Ive just gone all in, no more mega bash scripts that constantly bug out on the silliest problems whenever you try to do anything complex involving a list data type.
It just feels like its something you can pretty much always bend towards what you need without needing to breakout into another language and I'm keen to see some of the new performance stuff their continuing to work on.
The Internet loves to adopt a new shiny thing, try to convince everybody else it's the right decision because it's the decision they made, and then get quiet about it. (i.e. they went back.)
When comparing Bun and Node.js for my tasks, I keep finding more advantages in Bun’s optimizations. I'll handle GPU processes through BFFI. Node.js is also prone to unstable memory behavior with native processes, so it doesn’t make sense to use it as an extra layer.
For those looking for stability, Node.js is definitely the better choice.
I'm not quite sure I've seen a runtime, JavaScript or otherwise, that has the same network-level gating that deno enforces. Making an allowlist of addresses the default seems like it needs to be table stakes in the agentic era.
Why would just switching the binary version in path be something deep enough to have a preference?
Honest question, I'm trying to think how can the experience be good or bad in a command that's just "use 3.2". Isn't the whole thing a switch, a state variable and maybe handling the download if there required version isn't available?
One thing I've learned about tech is that you can never assume something is too boring for opinions.
The thing with being around for a while is the ability to seat on the porch, watching the adventurers' caravans pass by, once upon a traveller in one of those, now only the ones that actually make the way back into town matter to actually have a second look and talk to the strangers.
Alarms started ringing for me when they went for backwards support and focused heavily on that, when Bun was already on that route.
Sad but true.
That's what Deno does too, tho. Typescript is designed to work that way.
but some AI projects have been using deno desktop to run python via pyodide locally, I couldn't complain since it's like a sandbox to them
Bun seems popular too, what would be reasons to choose it?
I reported it, watched robobun write an unhinged +300 -0 patch which quickly got LGTM'd and merged.
I hope now that we've moved past AGI and into the ASI era things are better.
Ps to the original poster. I screw things like this up in my 2nd language all the time.
"more" and "-er" are sort of redundant. You could say
More light (but this is just awkward - you'd just say lighter).
Much lighter gives an extra degree of lightness than lighter.
Much much lighter even moreso. There's nothing wrong with saying it like this in an informal context like this, but it would generally be better to use words like significantly, vastly, enormously, slightly, a bit, considerably etc to modify the degree of "lighter"
Any LLM could explain the nuances of all of this in much much more detail (this actually makes sense, because detail is not -er).
English is difficult, but dont let that stop you - it is easy to communicate effectively with even a low degree of proficiency, when the other person is acting in good faith.
> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem. Nobody wants more Microsoft.
The reason Node disallows this has nothing to do with TypeScript being owned by Microsoft, it's because there's no guarantee the TSConfig settings used in the library you're pulling in match the ones in your project. A mismatch would mean you would get type errors inside the library code (assuming you're doing some form of type-checking in your application, otherwise what's the point of even using TypeScript).
> No TypeScript packages mean I need to find the latest churnware slop to bundle my stuff.
The TypeScript compiler itself comes with everything you need for this. See: https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#declaration
There are other advantages to bundling, but it's not strictly necessary if all you care about is publishing TS on NPM. Declaration files solve the problem by supplying the resolved types of the publicly exposed identifiers. Also has the added advantage of not locking out plain JS consumers.
OP doesn't want the types to be checked, they want the types to be stripped. Type stripping ignores tsconfig.json files and any of its features, see: https://nodejs.org/api/typescript.html#type-stripping
OP is talking about type stripping nonetheless, and I'd put type stripping into the same ballpark as reading ambient declarations, performance wise.
TypeScript has different semantics depending on settings in tsconfig e.g. useDefineForClassFields
> Node.js ignores tsconfig.json files and therefore features that depend on settings within tsconfig.json, such as paths or converting newer JavaScript syntax to older standards, are intentionally unsupported.
Of course import aliases and such features would break.
Now just deno install everything and even desktop works amazingly well.
- packages in workspaces can be used as dependencies without compilation (node's type stripping doesn't support this)
- a good permissions model for limiting access to system fs, net, etc.
- native WebGPU support (including building a windowed app without a web view)
- desktop gui builds that allow using Chromium embedded or WebView
- built-in linter, benchmark, coverage, etc.
Node does support this! Although it may depend on exactly you link the packages within a workspace — I use `pnpm` and it Just Works™. Because NodeJS looks at the resolved symlink to decide whether a project is in `node_modules` or not, if the symlink resolves to a package in the workspace, then NodeJS will do type stripping as normal.
In fairness, the documentation is very unspecific about this, so I just had to try it out and see what happens, but it does work.
I think NodeJS also has coverage these days, although I could be wrong there.
Even if I pick modern tooling, say Biome for linting and formatting, Vite for bundling and handling the build, Vitest for unit testing, and finally TypeScript.
Once that's done, it's then remembering the right values needed in package.json and tsconfig.json to do the right thing and Just Work TM. It's 2026 and all this slop still assumes I don't want ES modules.
I could spend a whole morning on this bullshit. With Deno, I don't have to.
I always contrast that with my preferred languages, like C#/.NET. Project setup takes literally a few minutes. Deno and .NET have that in common, there is a single CLI for it.
The Deno JSR/STD thing also has a whole collection of libraries and data structures I'd otherwise need to get from NPM.
LMAO okay bro.
With Deno I get TypeScript by default, security, a package manager that isn't riddled with nonsense and a dated UI, and I can compile my APIs to a single executable. No way am I going back to Node but then again, this ain't my blog post.
"deny access to ~/.ssh and other important folders" --> that alone would likely have 99.99999% sterilized most "hacks"
get with the program and be awesome with mise
But now that people seldom even look at the code, does it even matter? Our shared language now is English - across tests, frontend, backend, product briefs and design systems.
I have written a crap ton of node code before, because I liked it, but now I do everything in specialized stacks where each tech is chosen to best fit its environment. Backend - use Go, frontend - react/svelte/custom ,game simulation code - C#.
I just debate what would be best fit with an agent, do a few pilots to prove it and just go. Languages I’ve never coded in are super fast to execute - just insist on following best practice, modern conventions and do some spot checks against o(n) problems, architecture and parallelism - and it works, and vibe coded codebase with strict linting rules vastly outperforms fine tuned code in a shared language (node).
I honestly don’t see a bright future for them, and tbh I was surprised at Claude’s migration _to_ bun - why not just make the jump to something like ocamel that would let their agents have even more performance, context and linting tools, but I guess if they did it once the will do it again when they feel like it.
Although I was keen to get involved in Deno in the beginning and I'm a fan of Ryan Dahl, I just couldn't shake my preference for vanilla JavaScript; it was already the case before LLMs took over, but now even more so after LLMs. But I like that Deno is an option which users of my open source projects can use.
That said, Deno deserves the credit for making TypeScript as painless as possible. Juggling different Node.js and tsc versions and tsconfig versions was a major pain in the neck. I like how Deno forces a specific TypeScript version. None of that nonsense.
All the LLM issues I face are related to incorrect priorities, choosing the wrong tradeoffs, UX and UI flaws or incorrect assumption about requirements.
Why would I want to fill up my context window with useless type annotations and waste tokens generating them? Just like I don't want to be distracted thinking about types when I code, I don't want my LLM to be distracted by them either. Also, I don't want to waste time waiting for the transpiler to build. I don't use bundling nowadays - Not necessary if I use plain JS; instead I preload all my frontend libraries and distribute them individually; better for caching and they still download in parallel. I don't have to invalidate the entire bundle cache just because I updated one script.
Also, I don't want my LLM to generate over-engineered enterprise code. My priority is to get stuff done, not achieve job security.
I was under the impression that TypeScript is only statically typed, not strongly typed, too. Am I mistaken?
> Why? Just strip the types bro, I know you can!
Since when is it acceptable to make everyone else un-pollute his code?
Bun was promising, but as long as they don't fix their http GET implementation to accept the request body, its broken for me.
Note: Many real world tools like Elasticsearch's GET /_search with a JSON query DSL is one example. It breaks Axios. Many custom infrastructure tools expect it.
Advertising as node compatible and having this breaking change is undesirable. Hope it gets fixed soon.
Hint: Elasticsearch, GraphQL, Axios, etc..
Spec is not the same as compatibility.
And it was rather controversial that some listed a body as necessary for a GET request, and doing my research I came to find out that a "request body" was often quite undesirable and perhaps contrary to the RFC standards, and sending a "body" in a GET could result in undefined or unpredictable behavior. But it's all in good fun.
Perhaps the broken thing might be how you expect existing softwares to break so that your expectation can be satisfied. You should look at GET more closely.
There is a reason curl allows to send GET requests with a body. There is a reason node allows to receive GET requests with a body.
I understand why you'd want it, and that's why RFC10008 introduces QUERY as a GET-with-body alternative.
What is the use of spec adherence if it leads to unusable/broken applications.
Sticking to RFC is one thing. Advertising as node compatible is completely different altogether. Many people cannot see the difference.
Atleast a flag would suffice as that would ensure existing infrastructure tooling doesn't break while keeping the RFC spec folks happy.
https://github.com/graphql/graphql-over-http/blob/main/spec/...
The QUERY method is a step in the right direction but it came too late.
You should use bun :)
On a serious note, I thought only expressjs had it?
1. people choosing the ai companion for the frictionless relationship
2. people losing the skills needed for real life human relatioships
In my opinion TypeScript is not a feature. Why? 90% of the benefit of TypeScript can be obtained by using `foo({duck, clock})` pattern. And at 90% of the cost and time. TypeScript, like Java, is beneficial in situations where an error is catastrophic. That is not my situation nor the situation of what 90% of programmers?
So to the bro who wrote the otherwise interesting article I say "Just strip the types bro". You can do it!! You like it? You do it!
[Rant of course, but if you had wasted as much of your life writing types in Java you would probably rant as well. Recipe thinking sigh.]
sick burn. can't say i disagree though.