• Is Deno Already Dead?
• Originally written by Louis Petrik
• The Nuggets translation Project
• Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
• Translator: Inchill
• Proofreader: samyu2000, regon-cao

Is Deno dead?

In May, not only was the coronavirus the focus of attention, but Deno was also a hot topic in the JavaScript and back-end development community. The first stable version of Deno has been released to a lot of hype. I, too, quickly got involved with Deno and wanted to try something new.

I wrote an article about Deno and it got thousands of hits just by Google — obviously, there’s a lot of interest in Deno.

But what’s left after the hype? Where are the voices that even think Deno can replace Node.js? Apparently, the hype is running out — and Google’s statistics confirm it:

As you can see from Google Trends, the search term Deno isn’t as popular as it was in late spring or early summer — it should also be noted that Google Deno Trends don’t include category topics or programming languages. Some search results are not related to the technology, but are still included in the statistics.

The rise of other technologies

Many new technologies have emerged this year — Svelte on the front end, Deno on the back end. And, in general, many programming languages are getting a lot of attention. Rust and Julia are good examples — and JavaScript is not growing in popularity.

New technologies always bring new possibilities — and new frameworks and libraries. Of course, they all need to be tested by the market — so Rust’s Actix Web, for example, is gaining traction, but only in the Rust community and among those who are interested in it.

In my opinion, the reason Deno doesn’t have much room for attention — it doesn’t have any intention of revolutionizing the Web — is that everything becomes clear.

Nothing earth-shattering new

I mentioned this in my article on the differences between Deno and Node.js. Here are some of Deno’s most important and unique features:

• Do not support the NPM
• permissions
• The top Await
• Support for Window objects
• TypeScript support out of the box

These are some of the new and important features THAT Deno brings that I mentioned earlier.

After a lot of trial and error, most developers have probably realized that these features don’t make much difference to their development efforts. Especially for back-end development on existing projects, not much needs to change.

This is also evident in the professional use of Deno — seven companies use Deno, according to StackShare. IO.

Migration is expensive — and partly pointless

Of course, Deno and Node.js are very similar. In Deno, you can use TypeScript as well as JavaScript out of the box.

But when you see the word JavaScript, you immediately think of the many libraries and frameworks distributed throughout the JS community. Some of these are also available in Node.js. Just think express.js, Koa, Sails, Axios, Lodash or Sequelize. All of these libraries are used frequently in Node.js projects and can be easily installed via NPM.

NPM is the keyword that reminds you of Deno — because Deno was not designed to be used in conjunction with NPM, it’s hard to combine the two. This makes migrating from Node.js to Deno quite difficult. Deno is also known for its security — in fact, almost everything requires a user’s permission. This is also good and can improve the security of your application. But I don’t think that’s a good reason to completely migrate existing Node.js applications to Deno.

No extra performance

At this point, I want to make it clear that I personally don’t think Node.js should be placed on top of Deno just because of its performance.

When we measure it, performance is often quite unrealistic and can be completely ignored, especially for small applications with very few users. Extensible service providers allow you to easily adapt to your needs in terms of performance — you don’t have to install the fastest Web servers and databases on a fixed root server.

But even with the paper differences, it’s important to note that many developers are interested in performance. But in terms of performance, Deno doesn’t perform better than Node.js.

No wonder. After all, Deno never had any ambitions to replace Node.js in terms of performance. It’s more about security and things that go with it.

You can find it on the Deno website – benchmarking proves that Deno is not the fastest framework. Not to mention compared to Node.js.

The benchmark shown above compares Node.js with Deno’s standard HTTP request and response modules. This benchmark shows that Node.js provides higher performance.

I myself have benchmarked both platforms — the results are the same. Node.js performs significantly better. While the Deno doesn’t look too bad, performance is a major concern for many people.

Of course, performance is not the only determinant when choosing a technology. Frameworks and technologies such as Fastify or HTTP libraries for Go and Rust are gaining traction with users because of their superior performance. Therefore, you can assume that many developers are interested in good performance, and that Deno does not provide exactly the same performance as Node.js.

It is too early

New technologies are always quick to generate hype. Everyone wants to try something new, and now is the perfect time to provide content. As a result, the topic ballooned to an extreme, and most people had no serious intentions.

So far, some people have thought that Deno’s launch would mean the end of Node.js — of course, the topic will get a lot of attention and therefore be valuable to creators — but, of course, that’s completely overblown.

The result is a grandiose narrative that is no longer relevant to reality, and everyone wants to check for themselves whether Deno means the end of Node.js. Everything else is illogical. I haven’t decided to rewrite existing Node.js applications using Deno until I try it out.

When Node.js was announced and released in 2010, there wasn’t much interest. Early versions of the project always seemed a bit gory and intimidating.

Some technologies may become obsolete — within two years, the world may look very different after one or other scandal surrounding Node.js. In the past, NPM packages have had serious security issues. But in a crisis, someone always gains — and maybe Deno will be the big winner.

conclusion

Deno is good, it has its place.

Node.js wasn’t much hyped in its first release, and there’s still time to improve. Therefore, Deno can continue to improve.

Especially with respect to node.js performance and functionality that we don’t yet understand, there may be a lot of changes. Therefore, I’m interested in what Deno does in the future, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for Deno releases and updates.

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