[beeandapenguin]

IMO the silver lining to Deno is incredibly simple: it’s compatibility with the web platform. I’m not sure what you mean by not compatible with the larger ecosystem, as Deno is basically spec compliant except for the Deno namespace (which you can polyfill out).

If you haven’t experienced any pain authoring isomorphic JS with Node, that’s great! My experience has been the opposite of that. But with Deno, everything feels completely web native. You never need to worry about modules, syntax, platform features (even localStorage!), or packages… it just works.

On top of that, all the built-in tooling is high quality and I’ve never felt the need to replace them. A formatter, test runner, bundler, type checker, doc generator, benchmarker, and even the built in deployment platform. In fact, I’ve never experienced a more smooth deployment experience anywhere. There is nothing this cohesive in Node.

If you need one more reason, Deno is arguably the most secure runtime in the world. I would not be surprised to see more corporations start to use Deno for user submitted programs as we’ve seen recently with Supabase and Slack, for this reason.

[lhorie]

To be clear, IMHO, Deno looks fine for what it is. The features are great. The cons ironically mostly boil down to "it's not node", i.e. ejecting a non-trivial app from CRA into some vite setup is doable with some effort, but migrating to Deno is, charitably, likely a monumental task that nobody would ever undertake, even considering the upsides.

At the risk of diving too deep into opinion territory, I'm not all that enthusiastic about isomorphic JS (and I say this as a someone who's worked on a isomorphic framework). The promise of low learning curve is certainly appealing, especially for those still in the learning phase, but at least in my experience I find that isomorphism falls a bit short in practice because server and client semantics are just... different.

When I talk about compatibility, I'm specifically talking about non-platform compatibility, i.e. library authors need to consciously target Deno if they want to support it, and the way to do so may be entirely non-trivial (e.g. the lengths that postgres.js goes to, compared to slonik, comes to mind). But most of the JS ecosystem lives on NPM and imports things willy-nilly with no regard for whether their thing will work in Deno because that's the path of least resistance. This is not Deno's fault of course, just an unfortunate reality.

[maga]

Leo, your comments save me a lot of typing on threads like this, and since I recently wrote[1] what beeandapenguin wrote above almost to a point (sans security), I feel obliged to expand a bit.

You are right about incompatibility being a major issue; Deno recognizes that as well, hence, they are working on a compatibility mode that allows using Node specific libraries in Deno[2].

> migrating to Deno is, charitably, likely a monumental task that nobody would ever undertake, even considering the upsides.

This is, of course, contingent on the architecture used: for code tightly coupled to frameworks/runtimes it is indeed a monumental task. I have two small to mid size SaaS apps happily running on Node.js, but I'm looking forward to replacing it with Deno solely for the streamlined DX. The apps follow DDD architecture, thus, framework specific stuff is decoupled into a service/adapter and changing it is a day's work. The major technical road-block for now is indeed incompatibility of third-party libraries/SDKs written for Node.js (google sdk, mongdbo driver, etc.).

[1] https://itnext.io/moving-libraries-to-deno-the-whys-and-hows...

[2] https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/12577

[lhorie]

> The major technical road-block

Yeah, this is primarily what I'd expect would hold back migrations, both in actual technical terms (e.g. Deno-flavored libraries for some tasks may not exist at all) and buy-in from engineers. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to seriously consider Deno for our (very large) codebase (a 1000+ package monorepo with 400+ engineers committing), and I say this as someone who's successfully lead a number of massive migrations for this monorepo. But Node -> Deno at even 1/100 of this scale is, in my mind, potentially orders of magnitude more difficult than even a monorepo-wide Flow -> Typescript conversion, which is already fairly daunting migration.