Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend (dbushell.com)

303 pointsby ibobeva day ago228 comments

isyouaint 20 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 15 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 7 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.

jambutters 39 minutes ago

I don't think it loses the spotlight more so that it's just node is just good enough and the cost to switch and learn something new as too high

patcon 4 hours ago

I dunno, lots of activity around https://celld.dev the last few months. Deno team has been high on my radar more than ever since I discovered it:

https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2105853283617440032

https://youtu.be/G-v1hkQ8Sf8

https://github.com/stars/patcon/lists/awesome-celld

I get the sense that they'd just been brewing things around durable objects, and I'm excited for it coming to fruition

stillpointlab 3 hours ago

celld is very interesting and I've been following Dahl's posts on X about it. But it is not related directly to deno. The celld repo [1] for example suggests that it is 78.5% Rust.

It is much more of a side-quest and it doesn't answer the question: where is deno going?

1. https://github.com/denoland/celld

yearesadpeople 11 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 8 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.)

mplewis 2 hours ago

You're a user, not the owner of the Node ecosystem.

vermilingua 2 hours ago

This confused me for a minute too, I believe the distinction is whether bindings (.d.ts) are allowed in packages, or the library source itself is in TypeScript (.ts). I agree that NPM should enforce library source uses .js files with .d.ts sidecars.

Quothling 2 hours ago

I think Bun is still all the rage in some areas. For us the fact that it makes it easy to work with compliance, means it's often what we pick in place of Node when we work with typescript. Being able to build an API without using anything but the Bun runtime, the Microsoft Azure and our own internal Node packages makes the NIS2 compliance much less of a burden than if we'd work with Node.

That being said. I don't think anyone in my team considers us a "Bun" team in regards to Typescript, all our internal packages are Node packages as an example.

I don't personally have an opinion on it being owned by Anthropic. It was part of our risk assessment, but it obviously passed.

sangeeth96 an hour ago

curious: given the pace of bun development, lack of LTS/support on older point releases etc, how does it qualify this compliance check assuming I believe you're alluding to fewer deps as the reason for "less burden"?

culi 41 minutes ago

If compliance is the main deciding factor, wouldn't Deno be a major selling point since its inherently NIS2 compliant out of the box? Security is its primary foundational selling point

Bun has the same permissive trust model as Node

AgentME 18 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.

simantel 17 hours ago

FWIW Node now has node:test, but yeah you still need dependencies for linting and type checking.

hungryhobbit 5 hours ago

They made some really terrible, non-standard decisions with node:test though. It's a real letdown for me.

You'd think unit testing would be the most already-solved problem in the world: just copy what Jest, Mocha, Vitest, etc. do ... and you're done.

Instead they left out major features and implemented other features in really strange "why are you reinventing the wheel" ways :(

steve_adams_86 4 hours ago

I haven't used it, so I don't agree or disagree, but I'm curious: what do you think was left out or poorly implemented?

hungryhobbit 4 hours ago

Honestly I forget now, as I first played around with it months? years? ago when it was pretty new.

But one thing that stood out was .only(). In every major testing framework IT'S ASSUMED the dev is going to want to run one test at a time (sometimes). They make it super simple: you throw a ".only()" on the test, and the test runner only runs it.

In Node, you instead need to pass some special command line flag or add .only to every describe above the test ... which just makes a basic operation (run one test) much harder than it needs to be ... for zero benefit whatsoever (again, just do it the way every other test runner does it).

willio58 17 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 14 hours ago

Well, TBH being better than eslint (especially with the OCD-afflicted prettier) is a really, really low bar...

LoganDark 5 hours ago

Oxc ecosystem is still impressive.

ozim 41 minutes ago

TBH there were lots of npm clones that were „better/faster” and still npm is pretty much everywhere.

littlecranky67 16 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.

dzogchen 13 hours ago

Node.js has a built in test runner and it is excellent. https://nodejs.org/api/test.html

Not sure if the runtime should be responsible for linting of type checking.

cavoirom 7 hours ago

those features a great, but aren't what most of the people doing JS/TS care.

AgentME 3 hours ago

While I'm at it, I forgot to mention the built-in formatter (deno fmt) is great too. I use Prettier in other projects and it's also great in those projects, but it's tiring that it's yet another dependency to remember to add and configure in a new node project.

tuveson 20 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.

Bad news (well not news, this happened a while ago): https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/16/microsoft-github-agrees-...

arcanemachiner 19 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 19 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 18 hours ago

The article is from 2020, so you may already be able to make that judgment.

IshKebab 13 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 11 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 8 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.

mplewis 2 hours ago

Yeah man, it's super free! And the paid product even works properly 4 out of 5 weekdays

tyromaniac 10 hours ago

> 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.....

NoahZuniga 8 hours ago

node!=npm, and microsoft doesn't own the development of node.

theturtletalks 20 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.

lukan 19 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."

doginasuit 18 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 12 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.

da02 11 hours ago

Which stack is that?

doginasuit 3 hours ago

I use kotlin for the web, mostly because I like working in kotlin and it lets me share a lot of code with my compose app and server.

theturtletalks 9 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.

sheept 16 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.

NetOpWibby 15 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.

cpursley 15 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).

cpursley 7 hours ago

postgres is a sane choice, I can't type

NetOpWibby 6 hours ago

I enjoy LLMs as much as the next guy but man, having a baseline of knowledge about coding goes a long way.

SkyeCA 3 hours ago

It's not polite to say, but I have noticed a direct correlation between the skill level/knowledge of people I know and the quality of results they get from LLMs.

Heck even in my own usage I get far better results when using them in domains I know vs domains I don't.

wredcoll 2 hours ago

This take is so cold I can use it to reduce my house's cooling bill.

mahboi 14 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 12 hours ago

The only reason to ever touch it, are Android projects. I try to stay Gradle clean as much as possible.

mahboi 6 hours 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.

vips7L 3 hours ago

Kotlin projects too.

pjmlp 2 hours ago

Nah, Maven also does the job, and I don't do Kotlin anyway.

patadura 13 hours ago

They would rather have some unreadable python scripts and vendoring than using a package manager in a c++ project...

jtbaker 3 hours ago

HY SvelteKit

adamddev1 15 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 7 hours ago

Also the less you know, the more your solution will be the same as everyone else’s.

mahboi 14 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 14 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 12 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 11 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 10 hours ago

sounds like you don't know about agent skills yet.

evbogue 7 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.

steve_adams_86 4 hours ago

I'm concerned about the Deno team's lack of comms and opaque roadmap, but this post mostly demonstrates the author's lack of awareness of what Deno brings to the table and why it's still a compelling runtime in ways Node is still not.

There are valid reasons to choose both, valid reasons to be concerned about the direction of both, but most of the criticism here doesn't seem worthy of a blog post, let alone making it onto the front page of HN.

dzonga 10 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 10 hours ago

I agree. I don't think this is anything to sneer at.

fastball 21 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.

shard972 21 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 9 hours ago

Why did you use "mega bash scripts" with Node? That seems completely unrelated to your choice of JavaScript engine.

Muromec 20 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 6 hours 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!

Muromec 4 hours ago

Consider it my rpi. I have orange pi rv2 (8GB + 2TB NVME), it's the agentic nest where the harness runs and nfs+dlna archive is hosted. One of the agentic personas has the root. The thing is plugged into the router over Ethernet. It's not the fastest raspberry pi shaped thing on the network, but everything I needed worked without fiddling with FDT and using off-mainline builds. Somehow getting arch port to riscv64 and flashing it to microsd was enough to get things running. It probably even has functioning HDMI, but I'm not sure of that.

vlz 18 hours ago

The author gives his (non-technical) reason for not using bun here:

https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-09-10T12:08Z/

voxelghost 14 hours ago

without having the full background here. This feels like a very valid reason

real_faxenoff 8 hours ago

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.

sophacles 4 hours ago

It's useful to know where your software comes from. If something is largely funded by one company, we know it will move in the directions favorable to that company - you can be ready for it to move in a direction that you aren't happy with. If your stance on privacy is "my software should preserve it", perhaps primary developers of that software's association with anti-privacy advocates is worth consideration. This is particularly important in OSS with it's "no guarantees, no warantees, no accountable party" disclaimers - otherwise you might get fucked over when the next release starts doing something you really don't want it to (to extend the example above: e.g. sending all the logs to google or whoever).

hungryhobbit 5 hours ago

He really doesn't though!

> My interest in the Bun JavaScript runtime evaporated when I was informed of Jarred Sumner’s connection to Peter Thiel.

Ok, he doesn't really explain it in your link, but there's another link in that text ... surely that explains it:

>Anyway, I was recently made aware of Sumner’s connection to/fandom of Peter Thiel.

WHAT CONNECTION!?!?!? Did Peter Thiel help him murder someone? Invest $100k in his project? Is he friends with his uncle?

Look I think Thiel is a toxic human being too, but he's a major Siliocn Valley figure: you can't ostracize any project with any association with him, so if you're going to avoid using an entire technology, at least have the decency to say what this giant terrible connection is!

hungryhobbit 5 hours ago

Follow up: Thiel gave a (teenage) Summer some $$$ (ironically, the exact amount I guessed at randomly in my previous post!):

>In 2014, Peter Thiel's Thiel Foundation awarded a 19-year-old Jarred Sumner $100,000 along with mentorship.

So Thiel gave Summer, as a young starting entrepeneur, a $100k prize ... can you really fault him for liking Thiel a little after that? Apparently the OP does, and will refuse to use a technology Summer created simply because of it.

brettermeier 3 hours ago

Dude, are you trying to justify your ties to an ultra-fascist just because he got paid for it? How disgusting.

fastball 3 hours ago

If someone considered Peter Thiel an ultra fascist, wouldn't a great thing to do be to take his money and spend it on... not fascist things?

hungryhobbit 3 hours ago

I'm saying if I'm a young dev, and I get $100k from a famous VC, I'm going to lean towards being a little bit more positive about him than most people ...

... but that doesn't justify boycotting the young dev and everything he ever makes in the future.

brettermeier 3 hours ago

Look at what he posted...

Sugimot0 2 hours ago

Wow, I was enjoying bun up to now. This is pretty insane to see.

mrighele 12 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)

raspace 19 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.

wosined 17 hours ago

Many such cases.

mahboi 14 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 12 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.

mahboi 3 hours ago

That and other advantages gave them real uses. Some of them had freethreading earlier. Some were just faster. But people overstated how easy it was to switch.

tiborsaas 14 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.

polatronics 6 hours 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.

jesse_dot_id 12 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.)

rglover 5 hours ago

I've been working on a full-stack JS framework since 2021 (was oss; went private earlier this year) and still remember being asked "are you going to use <Deno|Bun> for this?" My answer was "no" and the why is exactly what you've said here.

All of the drama around Node was just that...drama. It works great, anecdotally keeps getting better, and while it definitely has shortcomings compared to Deno/Bun, I can at least trust that it isn't going away or mere months away from a pivot to curry favor.

I look at Deno/Bun as more supplemental, as-needed tools. I think the best Deno application I saw was on Bunny CDN's custom edge scripting. It was really nice to just hack together a script and know that it was going to pull and cache deps without me having to manage a dev environment. It also just worked out of the box.

Rambling, but I dunno. I kind of wish Ryan Dahl would move back to Node, bringing the wisdom and lessons from his Deno work.

hungryhobbit 5 hours ago

What kills me about Node is the org. They've controlled the Node binary for how many years now ... and for that entire time they have chosen a config format that sucks (JSON with no comments).

WHAT ENGINEER WORTH THEIR SALT DOES NOT WANT TO COMMENT THE CENTRAL CONFIGURATION FILE OF THEIR ENTIRE PROJECT?

austin-cheney 5 hours ago

You can have comments. If you are talking about the package.json file just create a new property named after your project and put whatever string you want in there.

mplewis 2 hours ago

That's a workaround, not a comment.

simonkagedal 2 hours ago

It’s good to inform people that this hack exists and can work for some situations, but no, that’s not “having comments”. Not even close.

benburton 15 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.

huhtenberg 12 hours ago

OP, if you are here, here's how the website looks in an older Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/hYh7Gat.png

znpy 12 hours ago

How old is that older Firefox?

jesse_dot_id 12 hours ago

But why?

VGHN7XDuOXPAzol 10 hours ago

(ironically) OP is from the UK, so would be geoblocked by imgur

huhtenberg 9 hours ago

Fair point - https://i.postimg.cc/LsPQjsmq/222.png

Sophira 9 hours ago

It also doesn't work properly if you disable JavaScript. On my phone, I can't scroll.

jerleth 17 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 15 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

pjmlp 17 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.

real_faxenoff 8 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 8 hours ago

Bun’s BFFI is very similar to Deno’s FFI. I believe the approach originated in LuaJIT.

stuaxo 14 hours ago

Oh, I always thought this was the blog of someone that had spent a lot of time developing using DBUS

torben-friis 11 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 7 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.

WorldMaker 2 hours ago

Relatedly, if you aren't developing C/C++/Rust packages against Node's FFI (rather than emscripten and wasm these days), why do you need a version manager for Node at all, just use your preferred package manager and stick to auto-upgrades of Node LTS.

(That's one of the things I appreciate about Deno is the "let's just auto-install point upgrades" evergreen mentality and its suggestion that side-by-side versioning is maybe a mistake in the JS world.)

solarkraft 21 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?

asutekku 17 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 17 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 14 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 9 hours ago

"much much more lighter"? What does that even mean?

nchmy 8 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 7 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 7 hours 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 6 hours 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.

norman784 15 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.

WorldMaker 2 hours ago

Node directly runs Typescript now, just not inside libraries (for political reasons not technical ones). It's type stripping approach is the strictest compared to Deno/Bun in that you must turn on a bunch of Typescript linting like Isolated Modules and Erasable Syntax Only to get it to work (and not use enums or namespaces). (Which is in line with the strictness suggested by the Type Annotations TC-39 proposal, for what it is worth.)

chrysoprace 21 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 19 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.

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.

whilenot-dev 16 hours ago

> A mismatch would mean you would get type errors inside the library code

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

DanRosenwasser 15 hours ago

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 14 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 14 hours ago

Type stripping cannot ignore tsconfig.

TypeScript has different semantics depending on settings in tsconfig e.g. useDefineForClassFields

whilenot-dev 14 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 10 hours ago

That's for running your own code. Not for running other people's code.

whilenot-dev 10 hours ago

I presume you didn't get the "Let me sign a deal with the devil!"-part OP mentioned in TFA then.

ghtbircshotbe 9 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 8 hours ago

nvm is not node. and there are better options for managing node versions (eg mise).

gandreani 8 hours ago

Or fnm! I use it and it's lives up to the name (it's much faster)

chrisweekly 2 hours ago

Agreed fnm is much better than nvm. But mise is potentially more compelling bc it can do more than just node.

stephbook 5 hours ago

How do you switch Deno versions on Debian?

mahboi 14 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.

hungryhobbit 5 hours ago

To me 1337 means being on top of the (hacker) game. Using yesterday's tech is like the opposite of 1337 to me ...

... but then again, I haven't even really used the term "leet" much (let alone spelling it with numbers) since high school.

mahboi 3 hours ago

Yeah that's the thing, 1337 itself is old

BrunoBernardino 9 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 8 hours ago

> instead of striping types

That's what Deno does too, tho. Typescript is designed to work that way.

BrunoBernardino 4 hours ago

I meant that Deno supports the full language, including enums and JSX/TSX. Node doesn't, AFAIK.

simonkagedal 2 hours ago

Node’s type stripping only handles “erasable syntax”:

https://nodejs.org/learn/typescript/run-natively