Two years ago the creator of NodeJS Ryan Dahl announced Deno a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, in this talk where he talked about the 10 things he regret about NodeJS and in the end of the talk he presented Deno and the motives behind it, why he is building this new JS runtime.

The 13 of May Deno 1.0 was released (here is the official blog post). By the end of the day every tech blog was sharing blog posts about Deno and some developers even started saying NodeJS is dead! like are you serious guys ?!

This is what we always see in the tech community when a new technology come to life the next day every other technology is dead, just take a second and remember how React Native was dead after announcing the first version of Flutter, since that and React Native continue to improve day by day and nothing is dead but the blog post about it :D

The short answer is NO! NodeJS is not dead and won’t be anytime soon, a lot of companies use it in production and the community around NodeJS is really big.
In the other side Deno come with a lot of improvements (which this post is about) so let’s talk about that now.

Here is a quick list of Deno features :

• It is based on "modern" JS features.
• It has TypeScript at its core, this may help it gain popularity, 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 aims to be browser-compatible as much as it can, for example by providing a built-in fetch and the global window object.

What I find cool about Deno, is the TypeScript support out of the box. As we see nowadays TypeScript is getting more popular than ever which will help Deno gain popularity, of course let’s not forget about the security improvements.

Finaly, I hope to not see an HR agent posting “Hiring! Senior Deno developer with +3 years of exp ONLY”

Feel free to leave your opinion on this in the comments section ;)

I post my thoughts in my LinkedIn profile.

Sources:
https://deno.land
https://deno.land/v1
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-deno-handbook/#will-it-replace-node-js