[chromakode]

I got thoroughly frustrated with Deno on a side project for similar reasons (leaky node compat abstractions, kludgey interop between code that does IO the Deno way and Node modules, immature Deno stdlib, undermaintained Deno libraries, spooky bugs). I lost a lot of time to figuring out how to make things work the Deno way.

Then I spent a day switching my codebase back to Node. I was struck by how much worse my code got. The Deno code made use of niceties like top level await and import maps. I needed to resort to a bundler to dedup instances of Y.js between my backend and Lexical. The Deno libraries tended have cleaner APIs (e.g. Oak vs. Koa).

After I took a step back, I scrapped the Node rework and accepted my misgivings with Deno, for now. Going back to Node was kind of like playing an older game; the graphics were great at the time but now that I've seen what a 2023 backend Typescript codebase looks like, I don't want to go back.

[shriek]

Heh I had the same experience but with bun. Lots of subtle bugs on stream and crypto packages where I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong only to find that it's a known bug in bun. I would have understood that there'd be bugs in relatively new runtime that's undertaking this huge task but it's not drop-in replacement for node as it claims to be and I wouldn't say v1 is stable at all.

[yencabulator]

That highlights a different difference. There aren't that many bugs in Deno; there's a lot of missing functionality (especially if you have node/npm-colored glasses on), but Deno is pretty much the highest quality "full Javascript runtime" when NodeJS compatibility is not a requirement.

Bun seems to be.. essentially a rewrite of NodeJS with the same basic plan.

[moltar]

Node has native top level await. However, figuring out how to make it work is an exercise in frustration for many.

[chromakode]

Yep! It requires ESM, which had other knock on effects in my codebase, IIRC with Lexical. I needed to hack around this a bit for Deno's module system as well (using esm.sh to preprocess Lexical) but it was a much nicer DX.

[tehbeard]

Is it much the same as trying to use esm in node while having legacy CJS code? Several options that end up with weird tradeoffs and bugs?

[throwaway11460]

npm install -g tsx

Name your files .ts and run with tsx ./file.ts

All done, good to go

[FractalHQ]

I just use npx vite-node or bun to run TS directly