alt Hacker NewsI haven't used Deno, but I do use Bun purely as a replacement for npm. It does the hard-linking thing that seems to be increasingly common for package managers these days (i.e. it populates your local node_modules with a bunch of hard links to its systemwide cache), which makes it vastly quicker and more disk-efficient than npm for most usage.
Even with a cold cache, `bun install` with a large-ish dependency graph is significantly faster than `npm install` in my experience.
I don't know if Deno does that, but some googling for "deno install performance vs npm install" doesn't turn up much, so I suspect not?
As a runtime, though, I have no opinion. I did test it against Node, but for my use case (build tooling for web projects) it didn't make a noticeable difference, so I decided to stick with Node.
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Deno does that. It also refrains from keeping a local node_modules at all until/unless you explicitly ask it to for whatever compatibility reason. There are plugins to things like esbuild to use the Deno resolver and not need a node_modules at all (if you aren't also using the Deno-provided bundler for whatever reason such as it disappeared for a couple versions and is still marked "experimental").
pnpm does all that on top of node. Also disables postinstall scripts by default, making the recent security incidents we've seen a non-issue.
IIRC bun zig code base has a lot of fine optimization too. I think the lead did a conference explaining his work. Or maybe i'm confused.
Deno does all that. Hell, yarn does too, or pnpm as the sibling mentioned.