Why Deno? - TLDR 🦕

Almost a year ago, in May 2020, Deno was launched.

Deno is the outcome of Node.js’ creator (Ryan Dahl) experience of using Node.js, after almost a decade of leaving its core team.

Ryan originally created Node.js back in 2009. Back then, Node.js brought JavaScript to the server side. Among other things, Node.js was a paradigm shift in the way many languages handled common tasks, as it deeply leveraged asynchronousity, something familiar among JavaScript users.

It suddently enabled many JavaScript developers to start building server-side applications. From there, it started being used for HTTP servers, but its usecases never stopped growing, helping make JavaScript today’s most popular language.

But…

However, as all the great creations, Node.js comes with its flaws. And for Ryan, its creator, they were a little itchy, especially when he got back using Node.js again to write simple scripts, after spending a few years without using it.

Ryan felt like he loved the productivity and prototypability of JavaScript, but some parts of Node.js were now getting in the way, as he explained in this talk.

Out of this experience’s learnings, and following the evolution of JavaScript over the last 10 years, Ryan created Deno, which is, as the documentation says:

A JavaScript/TypeScript runtime with secure defaults and a great developer experience.

I previously explored some of Deno’s premises and how it addresses specific Node.js problems in another article named Adventures in deno land.

I recently wrote a series of blog posts where we explore Deno to build multiple apps, check it out here.

If you’re interested in getting to know Deno even better, I recently wrote a book on it, called Deno Web Development.