Deno: has a basic permission model that is very helpful, written in Rust, and native TypeScript support.<p>I'm not deep in the webdev / node / Bun ecosystems, I've just been a happy user of Deno for small services for several years. Can someone explain why it sounds like there's such rapid growth of Bun? Is it just being used as a bundler, but not as JS runtime?<p>Just the permission system alone (though I wish it extended to modules) is so compelling with Deno that I'm perplexed at why someone would transition from node to bun and not node to Deno.
Deno and Bun had very different focuses when they launched. Deno was trying to fix a lot of what Ryan (the original creator of Node) thought was wrong with Node. Bun focused on compatibility with Node and the ability to run popular frameworks like Nextjs from the beginning.<p>A lot of dependencies and frameworks simply did not work with Deno for a long time. In the beginning it didn't even have the ability to install dependencies from npm. (In hindsight with all the npm supply chain attacks Ryan was probably right about all of these things).<p>So Bun was a better Node with a lot of very nice quality of life features that just worked and it required much less configuration.<p>I think the Deno team kind of realized they needed to have compatibility with Node to succeed and that has been their focus for the past couple years.<p>Edit: And Deno is now more compatible with node than bun.
> <i>In hindsight with all the npm supply chain attacks Ryan was probably right about all of these things</i><p>"Probably"? Are you saying there's a chance he wasn't right?<p>I really think Ryan deserves a lot more credit than a "probably". He put in a lot of effort to do the right thing and improve the security of the entire ecosystem he created.
I think the biggest issue with Deno is that it fixes real issues but in the wrong way.<p>Take the sandboxing stuff. In theory, you have always been able to sandbox your applications. There are so many tools that let you limit what domains an application can access or restrict access to the file system. This doesn't need to be handled at the language/runtime level. It's just that people were lazy before, and they will continue to be lazy afterwards by running Deno applications with fewer than the minimum set of restrictions because that's easier.<p>The more complete way of solving the problem would have been capabilities. Rather than sandboxing the whole application, you instead sandbox each individual function. By default a function can make no requests, access no files, execute nothing, etc. But while the application is running, you can pass individual functions a token that grants them limited access to the filesystem, say. This means that trusted code is free to do what is necessary, but untrusted code can be very severely limited. It also significantly reduces what dependencies can do: if you're using something like `lodash` which provides random utilities for iterating over object keys and the like, and suddenly it starts asking for access to the web, then clearly something is wrong, and the runtime can essentially make that impossible.<p>It's also great for things like build scripts, which are a common attack vector right now. If your runtime enforces that the build script only has access to the files in the project folder, and can't access arbitrary files or run arbitrary commands, then you're in a much safer position than if your build script can do basically anything.<p>This concept has been explored before, but JavaScript is basically ready-made for it. The language already has everything you need — a runtime that also acts as a sandbox, unforgeable tokens (e.g. `Symbol` or `#private` variables), etc — and you can design an API that makes it easy to use capabilities in a way that enforces the principle of least privilege. The biggest problem is that there's basically no way to make it backwards compatible with almost anything that works with Node, because you'd need to design all the APIs from scratch. But one of the great things about Deno at the start was that they did try and build all of the APIs from scratch, and think about new ways of doing things.
this<p>we nodejs devs were just ignorant/lazy<p>npmjs should mark libs "deno compatible" and move over to deno gradually for security
I started a new project with Deno specifically to avoid the NPM mess, and because it was created by Node's creator to fix its shortcomings. I'm new to Web development, but so far the experience has been pretty good.<p>Nice to see Deno being maintained. The features listed seem pretty substantial.
> Bun focused on compatibility with Node and the ability to run popular frameworks like Nextjs from the beginning.<p>and yet Bun's npm compat is much much lower than deno<p><a href="https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2057579066744881188" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2057579066744881188</a>
(thinking emoji) they could merge.<p>Seriously, they're both Rust now. They share goals.
I doubt it would work out. The engineering cultures could not be any different.
They may share some goals, but also have differing and opposing goals.<p>But it's possible that all 3 Deno, Node, and Bun could share some code in the future considering they now all require Rust as part of their build process.
> Can someone explain why it sounds like there's such rapid growth of Bun?<p>In my case, when I start a little Typescript side project, instead of drowning in the sea of npm/yarn/berry/pnpm/bubble/vite/webpack/rollup/rolldown/rollout/swc/esbuild/teatime/etc I can just use one thing. And yes, only some of those are Pokémon moves and not actual tools from the JS/TS ecosystem.
Same, I'm mostly a back end dev but when I dip my toes into frontend for personal projects Deno just seems like the most sane choice. It's really nice to work with. I'm kind of sad it doesn't seem to have taken off among the JS folks.
I use (and like) both. Bun is a drop-in replacement for node. If you don't want to fuss with test config, tsconfig, esmodules, etc., I find that it just works.
Deno has a nice standard lib, great CLI support, and I used to love deno deploy but its gotten very clunky these days.
I used Deno for about a year. I liked it for the reasons you gave, but there were way too many compatibility issues with packages like Astro, Prisma, Vite.<p>So, I switched to Bun and things have been much smoother!
I can tell you my experience as a js package dev, last tried a few weeks ago. We're building an npm package that's supposed to run on both node.js, deno & bun & the web.<p>This is an annoying to do for exactly two platforms: node.js, and deno.<p>node.js bcs it requires a workaround whenever something networking comes in: fetch doesn't work the same. So you structure you're code around having a node.js workaround. Same story for some other APIs. But you can test if itn works!<p>Deno is more annoying, you just can't test your package with deno before publishing. Before we released to npm, we installed a tar file and sent those around for testing. Works in node, in vite (node, for browser), works in bun, like a charm. Doesn't work with deno unless you switch to package.json, and you use exactly the subset of the spec that deno supports. You can't "deno install xyz.tar", you have to use npm for that (inserts a single line into package.json), THEN you can use deno to execute. No docs, no hint, just trial & error.<p>Even more annoyingly, npm & bun both offer 'link': in package repo, call npm/bun link, in the test repo do npm/bun link @yourpackage, and that's it, it's installed. Creates a dyn link to the source's build dir so you can rebuild without packing or sending tars or anything like that, you just build in your package dir and the test project is immediately updated.<p>Deno doesn't have that. What's worse, they don't tell you they don't have that. Also basically no error messages. It just fails in weird ways. Spent hours trying to do it. Now I just publish without testing for deno and wait for bug reports.<p>So out of the three: bun just works. That's it. Better than any platform. It just works, and it has a nicer CLI & nicer error messages, and it's faster on startup. It has the web api and the node api (i think) and its own api that's very nice as well, nicer than e.g. node. And e.g. if you run bun link, it tells you exactly what happened: this is what just happened, this is what you have to do to use it elsewhere. Node doesn't have that!<p>I think deno recognized bun's strategy of using npm dev's backbone as being the better call - that's why they're now slowly introducing node.js features, even though that goes against their original USP.
I think the main issue was when deno first came out it used urls for imports then later added support for npm.<p>By then bun was already a thing and just ate into its share.
I’m also perplexed that deno isn’t more quickly becoming the defacto server side JS/TS runtime. It really feels like the grown-up version of node.<p>Node always felt immature compared to stuff like go or java. I still preferred it to go and java. But deno is like node without all the shitty parts. It’s just so simple and productive and has so much good stuff built in. Even building projects with npm packages is easier with deno than with node now.<p>Bun feels like a faster horse, I guess. I really can’t imagine going back to node/bun on purpose, if I have a choice
Bun had some early (imo, extremely deceptive) benchmarks that showed it had really good performance compared to Node and Deno. Zig was also a fledgling hotlang and Bun managed to translate the Zig community into more energy behind Bun. In addition to that, the creator of Bun became a minor celebrity for spending probably over 12 hours almost every single day working on it.<p>Everything just came together at the right time really quickly and they managed to capitalize on it.<p>Also at the time Deno had only just started to backtrack on npm-compatibility and it was still in its infancy (I'd say its fully mature today). Bun was ahead of that curve which made it immediately useful.
because for most people they don't need what deno promises.<p>me for example only use nodejs or bun to run a basic sveltekit server, so it can render the html for the first time. all core functionalities are delegated to backend services written in crystal or rust. I don't need some bloated js runtime that hoard 500MB of ram for that purpose (crystal services only take 20+ MB each).<p>bun promised a lean runtime, every essential functionality is written in zig to increase the speed and memory footprint. and javascriptcore also uses less memory compare to v8. the only thing we expect is for bun to stabilize and can run 24/7 without memory leaking or crashing.<p>too bad it is a failed promise now.
Deno is from scratch attempting to pass as many NodeJS tests as possible. Bun piggybacks off the WebkitJS library iirc and shims anything nodejs specific it needs.
Deno permission system is so basic. What you need is capability system
I imagine some of Bun's growth is just simply V8 fatigue. JavaScriptCore does have some different runtime characteristics and it is nice to a diversity in language engines.<p>(It seems too bad ChakraCore is mostly out to pasture and not keeping up with TC-39 and that there's still no good Node-compatible wrapper for SpiderMonkey, but having one for JavaScriptCore is still a breath of fresh air.)
When Deno first came out it was deliberately incompatible with Node, which limited its ecosystem and audience. Bun came along with a lot of Deno's great features but also Node compatibility, and people really took to that.<p>But Deno's got Node compatibility now, and Node has adopted a lot of the features that make Deno and Bun so usable. So I'm not sure the choice matters so much these days.
I wonder how Deno's faring.<p>Node's the stable solution and will be with us forever. You can now use TypeScript with it and, soon enough, you'll be able to build your app to a single executable -- including native deps.<p>Bun's chaotic but, nonetheless, it's _fast_ and it's taking an interesting approach by including everything in the stdlib. Plus, bought by Anthropic.<p>Deno had an awesome story with the sandbox and ease of import for third-party dependencies. Sandboxes feel pretty commoditized now and I'm not sure the import mechanism ended up being that much nicer than a `npm add`.
They did lay off ~half the company ~2 months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47467746">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47467746</a>
It's good to have some options, to prevent the ecosystem from stalling
> Plus, bought by Anthropic.<p>Who thinks this is a positive?!
That wasn't a value judgment on the acquisition. I was just pointing out that it made the project more sustainable.
That's a yes and no. Venture funded companies like Anthropic have a history of low follow through with peripheral projects (like Bun is for them). Of course they do - their responsibility is ultimately primarily to their investors - not to Bun. So the risk now is that Anthropic will can Bun whenever they just lose interest or feel it's just a drain that's not contributing directly to their bottom line.<p>Node.js itself did have trouble finding a corporate home that was interested in providing good support for the project, and that's how we got the oi.js fork of Node, which luckily led to Node being transitioned to a foundation and the projects merged. This whole history is what made me so surprised that Ryan of all people would attempt another js runtime (Deno) project as a corporate project.<p>And it's the reason I'm staying away from both Bun and Node. I can't afford platform risk like this. I need my startup to be built on a project that has a more reliable future trajectory, which is what you get with a proper open source project (emphasis on project) that you get with Node. Node is stable and still getting features, but most importantly it's not going away.
It really doesn't. You think Anthropic will still be in business in 10 years? If they are, it's not likely they'll be in the same shape.
It means they're a whole lot less likely to run out of money, which makes them a safer bet as a dependency.
Running out of money is never the issue with a big company buying an open source project. There are countless examples of projects dying or changing significantly for the worse after acquisition.<p>Also “no human wrote any of this code” is not my personal benchmark for a reliable dependency.
> It means they're a whole lot less likely to run out of money, which makes them a safer bet as a dependency.<p>I don't think this logically follows. That is, yes being acquired makes one less likely to run out of money, but doesn't necessarily make something safer as a dependency.<p>Plenty of open source projects have little to no funding and continue on for years with no problems. But being acquired suddenly creates a <i>requirement</i> of return-on-investment. A corporation will happily shut the whole thing down if and when it's decided that they're just not gaining enough value from it.<p>(There's also the general fact that, a corporate-acquired project is going to first and forement serve the needs of the corporation vs. the community at large - if your use case or edge case doesn't align with the needs of Anthropic then you should probably not hold your breath waiting for the Bun project to address it.)
> safer bet as a dependency.<p>The recent 1 million line vibe coded PR suggests it is not so reliable as a dependency.
That was Bun at Anthropic, not uv at OpenAI. (UPDATE: My mistake, this thread is about Bun, not uv.)
running out of money, for an open source project of almost any kind, is safer than "running into money" with the wrong strings attached<p>(still reserving judgement on Bun, though — I mean, we'll soon see, one way or the other!)
Afaik there is no proof Anthropic is profitable. This, and uv buyout by OpenAI only adds a risk to supply chains. In few years these companies can be overrun by open source models or startups delivering new hardware/software breakthrough in LLM. It is not like uv and bun are acquired by IBMs or Alphabets of today.
Wasn't it announced that Anthropic is having their first profitable quarter right now in Q2? From what I've personally seen it's all driven by enterprise adoption.<p>Open source/foreign models are already way cheaper and will work just fine for most use cases but a lot of businesses are already pretty locked in to Claude, and with enterprise costing $240 a year at a 20 seat minimum it's a pretty big investment to make and won't be worth migrating unless the gains are significant.
What happens if Anthropic and OpenAI shut down?<p>Is it different from the status quo prior?
Yes, famously, acquisitions only make services more reliable, as in the case of Microsoft and Github, or Apple and DarkSky.
> which makes them a safer bet as a dependency<p>Wouldn't node be the safest bet as a dependency?
For those who care about their dependencies being "safe bets", Bun should already be out of the question after the recent "vibe code the entire thing into a different language in a week with zero human intervention" fiasco.
You can already ship single executables, my product's CLI is a Node single executable application
> <i>and, soon enough, you'll be able to build your app to a single executable -- including native deps.</i><p>Whoa, did not know that. That's a killer feature!
Deno rules, I write some tiny and mid-size web services using it. Works like a Swiss clock, the project ideology is well aligned with the Unix sprit.<p>In my personal opinion, Deno authors are a bit humble. For example, when grateful users offer donations to the project, the authors politely decline them. I understand why, but at the same time it may create unneeded monetary pressures on the project in the long run.<p>What can work reasonably well is a shut-up-and-take-my-money monthly subscription for users depending on the project long-term success.
> Works like a Swiss clock<p>It really is such a pleasure. It feels almost like a blend of JS and Go. Fast, flexible, slightly saner package management with more powerful capabilities than other JS/TS alternatives, a better security model, better standard library (so to speak)... And very fast. I love it.
Deno is a JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, for those who don't recognize the name. Here's a review of Deno 2.6 vs competitors Bun 1.3 and Node.js 25:<p><a href="https://www.devtoolreviews.com/reviews/bun-vs-node-vs-deno-2026-comparison" rel="nofollow">https://www.devtoolreviews.com/reviews/bun-vs-node-vs-deno-2...</a>
It's surprising to me that bun is so much faster serving web requests. The article mentions Zig as a factor, but is micromanaging memory really gaining over 2x vs node?<p>Similarly, it seems, though they didnt exactly say, that they're running bun with a warm package cache... What about the others? Do they have caches?
> The article mentions Zig as a factor, but is micromanaging memory really gaining over 2x vs node?<p>As someone who has optimized by reducing/batching heap allocations, 2x seems within the realm of possibility, depending on the exact circumstances.<p>That being said, iirc, node also has more hooks for things like observability than bun does, which might hurt it here
It's great to see that since the release of Edge.js [1], they started to take Node.js compatibility more seriously (they went from ~40% to about 75% in just 2 months, so either coincidental or not this is clearly a step on the right direction).<p>Good work to everyone on the Deno team!<p>[1] <a href="https://edgejs.org/" rel="nofollow">https://edgejs.org/</a>
The new *deno pack* command is a nice addition for safe and simple packaging.<p>For those using Node.js, a similar single command is available with <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-node-pack" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-node-pack</a><p>Now that Node.js supports importing .ts modules, more repos can use them without a build step or putting any build artifacts in the checkout.
Yeah, that's my immediate debate in reading this blog post: `deno pack` might be a great replacement to my existing `npm publish` workflow for my open source packages and continue shifting my work to Deno-first/Deno-mostly, but on the flipside, with Node's growing TS support I'm also considering switching to Typescript-only npm packages as a (tiny) message to the ecosystem.<p>Though I'm also happy that JSR exists as that (mostly) cleaner ecosystem.
Node refuses to support TypeScript within node_modules, see <a href="https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/58429" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/58429</a> this means you can't do "Typescript-only npm packages".<p>They made that intentionally at the beginning:<p>> Currently there is consensus that Node.js should NOT run TypeScript files inside `node_modules. It is not supported to avoid package maintainers to release TS only package.
It sounds a lot like DNT (<a href="https://github.com/denoland/dnt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/denoland/dnt</a>) which has existed for a long time, but having it in Deno cli does bring significant visibility.
As someone who has used Deno on multiple hobby projects, I’m convinced Deno is where the JS ecosystem should be heading.<p>Professionally though, it’s complicated recommending it outside of specific and mostly tightly scoped use-cases. At some point the project just changes direction because of business reasons and you need node.
I think if Deno had held on to their initial values for a little longer the pressure towards node compatibility would have been mended by AI agents, because a lot of the pressure is the result of skill issues: if the only way you know how to set up is using express.js then any subsequent tool or runtime must provide a similar abstraction for a “smooth” transition, regardless of how bad the first solution was in the first place. Nowadays you introduce devs to new tech by delivering your product with a set of skills that in practice have replaced documentation and sometimes can be very good at showing better alternative approaches to whatever you’re building.
The continuous performance improvements in Deno are really impressive. Node compatibility getting better with every release makes the transition a lot easier for existing projects.
By the time I read this, the blog post doesn't exist yet:<p>> The release post for v2.8 is not yet published.<p>> Check GitHub releases page for the latest release status of Deno.<p>The release is here: <a href="https://github.com/denoland/deno/releases/tag/v2.8.0" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/denoland/deno/releases/tag/v2.8.0</a><p>EDIT: Formatting
I wrap most node-isms and use deno as the runtime. Works well. If a project is pure typescript I just have deno run it. Extra options for security are great, installation scripts disabled by default, etc.<p>If you're using node directly, please stop. At a minimum use Bun.<p>With agentic work, there is little reason to use anything besides Rust and Typescript in any case. Room to disagree but type safety, memory safety, and a large corpus of work is critical. Agents need difficult errors and baked in patterns they navigate it easily. For UI, Typescript makes the most sense just because of the mass of design examples.
I literally just discovered Deno today. I wish there was Deno for Python / WASM path was really mature. Maybe I'm missing something here, but trying to secure both a Python runtime and JS runtime for AI.
A lot of these changes seem geared toward adopting Node/NPM default DX. To the point where Deno DX (or what it was previously) now comes second.<p>The worst of the changes is "lib.node included by default", if I'm writing Deno or web code I absolutely don't want node types included by default. Those types were a pain to deal with even in Node projects, resulting in multiple tsconfigs to avoid those types polluting platform agnostic or web code.<p>If Deno continues this trajectory then there is less and less reason to use it over Node.
npm by default: When I tried Deno ~1-2 years ago - I immediately shinned myself on this and decided to wait for more sensible defaults. (I've not followed closely, just the basic story)<p>And reading the features, I'm impressed! - I spot many commands & features that map to my workflow.<p>Well done Deno team.
Is anyone here using Deno in production?
I don't get it why the hell is TypeScript still not nativly supported in modern browsers?
Because "it doesn't exist". It's just a layer on top of js, it doesn't have its own runtime, and btw what would supporting ts a the browser level mean? If you want to support a static typed language then you could just compile it down to wasm, if you just want to support types and ignore them at runtime there's an overhead price to pay, or should do runtime type checking? And with which tsconfig? Strict or not?
It is a language, it doesn't matter to what it is downcompiled to be able to be run in a browser.<p>Its now 13 years old, not a hard language to have a proper runtime for it and it would just get rid of all the npm stuff.<p>And for the amount of typescript we now have, it would be worth it to have proper native support.
> Because "it doesn't exist". It's just a layer on top of js, ...<p>C++ was originally a layer on top of C. The first C++ compiler, "cfront" was actually a transpiler to C.<p>There is nothing preventing TypeScript from becoming "native" in a similar way.
All good questions. But... it would simply eliminate a step and result in a single language.<p>Python supports types and is interpreted, right?
Interpreted that's right, in fact it's super slow and adding types adds up to parsing time. Javascript is jitted. Python types serves no purpose if not for documenting or letting the lsp doing some lightweight type checking. And btw typescript introduced many breaking changes and the spec is managed by microsoft something you don't want for the open web. What we would really benefinit from would be having WASM being able to do more inside the browser, like rendering, managing user input, accessibility, dom manipulation. Then u could compile your favorite static types lang down to wasm. Hell even a strictier version of TS could be made to do that, iirc there's something similar called assembly script
Python containing type hints doesn't get transpiled the way typescript does. The transpiling rewrites the TS to varying degrees depending on the target and the extra TS features being used.<p>Python "just" (that word is doing a lot of work) updated the interpreter to ignore the type hints. It still runs the same way as code without hints.<p>There's a bit more going on with TS that you couldn't just have the runtime ignore the types.
Because standardization is a political process that takes time and consensus to achieve?<p><a href="https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations</a>
Likely because everybody would still strip types, bundle and minify their typescript code anyway.
My gripe is why doesn't Webassembly fully support dom manipulation. If we got that working anyone could just bring any language to the browser and we would finally be free from the shackles of JS.
JS promise to never break the web. can't say the same about TS
There wouldn't be any benefit. It's not sound so it can't really be used to improve performance.<p>There was a proposal to support TypeScript <i>syntax</i>, but ignore the actual types (this is basically how Python works). That would be kind of nice because you can skip the compilation step completely (less faff for small projects), but I don't think it went anywhere... or if it is it's getting there at a snail's pace:<p><a href="https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations</a>
The release post for v2.8 is not yet published.
Check GitHub releases page for the latest release status of Deno.
I like Deno for the web standards. I think it should be sponsored by the government for it to flourish.
I don't know why they copied NPM's backwards `npm install/ci` thing. Most people think that `install` <i>does</i> use the lock file.
> Deno now defaults to npm:<p>This is an interesting development. npm after all is the de-facto ecosystem and leaning into it makes sense.<p>I'm wondering how Deno would've been received if it supported npm and package.json from day 1.
I actually lost interest in Deno once it started leaning into NPM. I thought it was a bold and wise idea to make a clean break from the mess of Node and restart with a sensible ecosystem. Absent that... I'm just sticking with Node.
I think Deno's done a pretty good job at keeping what it did well in Deno 1 while also playing ball with Node/npm compatibility. JSR feels like the more sensible ecosystem we all need (especially high scoring packages) and while this current change leaves JSR prefixed when doing a `deno install` it doesn't change the fact that the more packages you install from JSR instead of npm the better things feel. (Especially once you can break from package.json and node_modules, but even the baby steps along the way to that goal still feel pretty good.)
I previously worked at Deno and even with all that tbh, I am not sure the http deps were the right way to go. I've really wanted to like them but package managers really have advantages.<p>I would not say npm was the right direction. I actually was a fan of JSR (didn't work on it but all my experience with it was great)
As someone that works in projects with standard IT tools, not supporting NPM made it a non starter for us.<p>No way it would go through standard build pipelines, or team skills.
Oh, for sure. But I'm old enough to remember when standard IT tools would have never supported Node in the first place and the idea of JS on the server made everyone scream. You just need to build demand for that support.
"standard" IT tools?
Yes, IT from customer, or agency delivery operations, dictates what are the official tools in specific projects, including 3rd party dependencies in internal repos, and CI/CD is cut off from accessing public Internet.
This is a really odd change. Deno already supported installing npm packages, this only removes the "npm:" prefix requirement for cli commands. Considering the nightmare that is npm, I was quite happy for jsr to become the defacto registry for the Deno ecosystem. If anything I would've expected the "jsr:" prefix to be the default.
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