In this post I want to get you up to speed with Deno quickly, compare it with Node.js, and build your first REST API with it.
What is Deno?
If you are familiar with Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript ecosystem, then Deno is just like Node. Except deeply improved in many ways.
Let’s start from a quick list of the features I like the most about Deno:
- It is based on modern features of the JavaScript language
- It has an extensive standard library
- It has TypeScript at its core, which brings a huge advantage in many different ways, including a first-class TypeScript support (you don’t have to separately compile TypeScript, it’s automatically done by Deno)
- It embraces ES modules
- It has no package manager
- It has a first-class
await - It as a built-in testing facility
- It aims to be browser-compatible as much as it can, for example by providing a built-in
fetchand the globalwindowobject
We’ll explore all of those features in this guide.
After you use Deno and learn to appreciate its features, Node.js will look like something old.
Especially because the Node.js API is callback based, as it was written way before promises and async/await. There’s no change in place for that in Node, as such a change would be monumental, so we’re stuck to callbacks or to promisifying API calls.
Node.js is awesome and will continue to be the de facto standard in the JavaScript world. But I think we’ll gradually see Deno more adopted because of its first-class TypeScript support and modern standard library.
Deno can afford to have everything written with modern technologies, since there’s no backward compatibility to maintain. Of course there’s no guarantee that in a decade the same will happen to Deno and a new technology will emerge, but this is the reality at the moment.
Why Deno? Why now?
Deno was announced almost 2 years ago by the Node.js original creator Ryan Dahl at JSConf EU. Watch the YouTube video of the talk, it’s very interesting and it’s a mandatory watch if you are involved in Node.js and JavaScript in general.
Every project manager must take decisions. Ryan regretted some early decisions in Node. Also, technology evolves, and today JavaScript is a totally different language than what it was back in 2009 when Node started. Think about the modern ES6/2016/2017 features, and so on.
So he started a new project to create some sort of second wave of JavaScript-powered server side apps.
The reason I am writing this guide now and not back then is because technologies need a lot of time to mature. And we have finally reached Deno 1.0 (1.0 should be released on May 13, 2020), the first release of Deno officially declared stable.
That’s might seem just a number, but 1.0 means there will not be major breaking changes until Deno 2.0, which is a big deal when you dive into a new technology - you don’t want to learn something and then have it change too fast.
Should you learn Deno?
That’s a big question.
Learning something new such as Deno is a big effort. My suggestion is that if you are starting out now with server-side JS and you don’t know Node yet, and never wrote any TypeScript, I’d start with Node.
No one was ever fired for choosing Node.js (paraphrasing a common quote).
But if you love TypeScript, don’t depend on a gazillion npm packages in your projects and you want to use await anywhere, hey Deno might be what you’re looking for.
Will it replace Node.js?
No. Node.js is a giant, well established, incredibly well supported technology that is going to stay for decades.
First-class TypeScript support
Deno is written in Rust and TypeScript, two of the languages that today are really growing fast.
In particular being written in TypeScript means we get a lot of the benefits of TypeScript even if we might choose to write our code in plain JavaScript.
And running TypeScript code with Deno does not require a compilation step - Deno does that automatically for you.
You are not forced to write in TypeScript, but the fact the core of Deno is written in TypeScript is huge.
First, an increasingly big percentage of JavaScript programmers love TypeScript.
Second, the tools you use can infer many information about software written in TypeScript, like Deno.
This means that while we code in VS Code for example, which obviously has a tight integration with TypeScript since both are developed at MicroSoft, we can get benefits like type checking as we write our code, and advanced IntelliSense features. In other words the editor can help us in a deeply useful way.
Similarities and differences with Node.js
Since Deno is basically a Node.js replacement, it’s useful to compare the two directly.
Similarities:
- Both are developed upon the V8 Chromium Engine
- Both are great for developing server-side with JavaScript
Differences:
- Node is written in C++ and JavaScript. Deno is written in Rust and TypeScript.
- Node has an official package manager called
npm. Deno does not, and instead lets you import any ES Module from URLs. - Node uses the CommonJS syntax for importing pacakges. Deno uses ES Modules, the official way.
- Deno uses modern ECMAScript features in all its API and standard library, while Node.js uses a callbacks-based standard library and has no plans to upgrade it.
- Deno offers a sandbox security layer through permissions. A program can only access the permissions set to the executable as flags by the user. A Node.js program can access anything the user can access
- Deno has a for a long time envisioned the possibility of compiling a program into an executable that you can run without external dependencies, like Go, but it’s still not a thing yet. That’d be a game changer.
No package manager
Having no package manager and having to rely on URLs to host and import packages has pros and cons. I really like the pros: it’s very flexible, we can create packages without publishing them on a repository like npm.
I think that some sort of package manager will emerge, but nothing official is out yet.
The Deno website provides code hosting (and thus distribution through URLs) to 3rd party packages: https://deno.land/x/
#deno #node-js #javascript #typescript
