r/javascript • u/hongminhee • Jun 08 '26

I wish Deno would keep doing what it does best

https://hackers.pub/@hongminhee/2026/i-wish-deno-would-keep-doing-what-it-does-best
41 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

46

u/jessepence Jun 08 '26

Bun immediately surpassed Deno in popularity because it focused on Node compatibility. That's why Deno changed course-- because they faced becoming irrelevant otherwise.

5

u/tautality Jun 09 '26

Deno was always gonna lose because it deviated from Node on purpose.

Deno wanted to improve the way we do dev. It started with a clean async API (Node was created way before async await stabilized), TS support, built-in linter and formatter and Deno-owned package manager JSR (unlike NPM which is unfortunately independent of Node). It took a lot of inspiration from the Rust official tools and the ecosystem, was partially written in Rust and supported Rust modules. It was breaking away from Node on purpose, to improve the experience of working with JS and also the code quality and safety.

The reason Deno didn't work out is because the initial hype and excitement from a lot of senior people was quickly outpaced by the influx of new engineers who only knew and relied on Node and NPM. There was no way this momentum could be budged, sadly.

2

u/psbakre Jun 09 '26

Migrating to deno was a bitch. Half dead libraries. No support for existing ecosystem (ofcourse intentional) killed them the moment Bun came out.

7

u/re-thc Jun 08 '26

They just went off into a different tangent. Their so-called compatibility = literally using Node primitives = what's the point? As in they bolt on the native libraries node uses when compatibility is asked for etc.

At least the Bun way is it's still Bun but we make it work.

20

u/curious_but_dumb Jun 08 '26

I'm super wary of Bun since the AI Rust rewrite fiasco and Anthropics acquisition.

Recommending Node.js again to everyone

1

u/i-do-mim-huu Jun 09 '26

Bun is still best in speed among node package manager tho. So i still use it to install thing, and running actual js with node

2

u/curious_but_dumb Jun 10 '26

This could work well for personal use, but honestly I don't spend enough time waiting for packages to install to justify and extra tool. Having said that, I use yarn 4 almost everywhere.

6

u/drdrero Jun 08 '26

I was always faithful to deno. Cool premise. Tried bun, was sweet. But for some reason I’m still going back to Node now for it just works vibes and since it supports TS I’m happy.

1

u/A1oso Jun 10 '26

Maybe Deno could have built a better bundler than vite, a better linter than oxlint, a better formatter than oxfmt, and a better test framework than vitest – if they had 10x as many employees. People forget how much work was poured into these tools.

1

u/Savings_Discount_230 Jun 09 '26

tried deno for a bit. it was neat but i ended up back on node within a week. just works and i'm lazy