This is an unfair side jab at Deno, it’s not being used as widely as Node (yet), but it’s the go-to edge runtime beside Cloudflare workers and the underlying system powering Supabase functions.
Deno is betting on edge computing to explode and offers a good offering (Deno Deploy) in that space leveraging how it has a smaller API and faster startup times than Node.
It also thinks that edge computing is a good space to leverage the myriad of web APIs it supports + there are certain workloads that it does better than Node (like single executable)
I think it’s really unfair to Deno as thats existed for many years and gets ignored meanwhile a hobby project is being touted as “the node replacement”.
Deno showed there is space for not-Node, and that developers would be receptive to this.
And yes, Deno is just one player in edge, but you can agree there is much more money involved with all those other players you listed.
It’s going to be a battle of eyeballs from those edge providers then wouldn’t it? Whether that’s consulting or licensing fees, or just an acquisition / acquihire player.
Maybe you’re suggesting these players would build a runtime themselves. From my experience, only a fraction of companies, rarely, tackle ambitious projects like this. It’d be hard to justify to management who need quarterly results. Instead, they’ll fork an existing technology and make it better, because you can show incremental progress but keep your baseline. For example, Facebook didn’t rewrite their PHP code right away. They wrote a faster interpreter.
Deno wasn't originally designed to be node compatible, but I think they realized nobody would want to switch to it because node is so prevalent already...
I'm not deep in Node world but I use it and see it being used, who is using Deno out there? Have there been some notable/major ship jumps? Or is it not that kind of situation (perception from when it came on the scene is that's exactly what it is, constantly trying to woo Node devs over). And also there's alot of recognizable brand competition out there from things like Cloudflare, Netlify (but they're an investor in this?), Vercel on fire the last year or two, and not to mention the big FAANG types. Again, who's using this?
Is that still the case tho? Recent Deno releases have obscured how well it's Node compatibility mode is, I was just wondering if you have more details.
I have been following the progress of Deno for a little bit, and slowly but surely the project is evolving from a full-scale Node.js replacement to a serverless/edge compute platform. I get that it's the hot thing in tech these days, but to me that just isn't very appealing.
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