Thank You, Deno

> Deno 1.0 shipped in 2020 on the original terms, & then spent the next four years walking them back one piece at a time. First the deps.ts convention, one file that re-exported every URL: a manifest in all but name. Then lock.json, an integrity hash per URL: a lockfile. Then import maps, so you could write bare specifiers again.

I object to two of these categorisations.

deps.ts was a convention, not a built-in runtime feature. If you want to follow the convention, that's fine. It's just a regular old typescript file!

Import maps were not Deno walking back, but implementing a web platform feature. Parity with browser JS was a standout feature of Deno from the beginning. This was walking forwards if anything.

However, broadly, the story is indeed one of Deno moving away from its opinionated roots towards pragmatism (drop-in replacement for Node).

I do hope there will be forks. Some are mentioned in the comments.

Bun and Deno are now big-tech dependent. For the better, and the worse.

I'm really sad about the announcement and that the Deno runtime as it was is going away. I'll definitely be following and likely using an active fork if it presents one.

I've been using Deno a lot for straight shell scripting. Being able to link directly to dependencies and run without a separate install step or node_modules directory is huge. The fact that it's a single binary download and can self update is so nice too.

I'm not sure if these features are similar for Bun or not. I'm just sad about the whole thing.

I guess between the original Node and the many alternatives that aren't Node (that I, a former PHP guy using Go for side projects, wish would gain more traction) there isn't enough of a niche for a "mostly like Node, but with fewer warts" project?

Thank you deno!

You are added to the list of projects I thought would really become essential to my work but slowly faded away. Another one, for example is rethinkdb.

At least Deno actually caused some movement in the node world, just like io.js.

I was often curious to/wanted to deploy little applets on their publishing platform/utilize their in-language db. I was always scared of what would happen to my app/db in the future. Well, what is happening to those deno deploy apps?

I do think those of us who were long skeptical of Deno are owed a small "I told you so".

Fundamentally, there is a big sect of the JavaScript ecosystem / culture that is hype-driven and has extreme churn. Jumping to every new framework and runtime without thought for the long-term, or any regard for historical patterns.

This stuff keeps happening. Somehow I'd love to get through to the perpetuators of the JS hype treadmill that they're only hurting themselves and making themselves look foolish when the churn inevitably hurts them and the wider ecosystem.

But maybe they jumped to the next shiny thing after Deno before Demo's demise was announced, and they'll learn nothing.

Related:

Cloudflare acquires Deno

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019911