Table of Contents
Node.js versus Deno
Deno vs. Node.js — Here are the most Important Differences
Security, both under the hood, the window-object & TypeScript support
“Now, i haven’t studied Deno at all. But since it relies on V8 for the actual execution, it will still have to transpile TS to JS. The developer doesn’t have to bother with it anymore, but it has to happen at some point. And whether it’s more secure t…
I love how Deno tries to fix the worst aspects of Node, but unfortunately I’m probably not going to touch it until it has a mature ecosystem. Even then, I probably won’t switch from Node for production projects. We just deployed 2 sites that use SASS… Read More 53
1 Monashq Monashq 3 months ago
53 1
- Node_is_not_going_anywhere
Pedro Hase Pedro Hase 3 months ago
52 1 If those are all the advantages that Deno has over NodeJS, then I don’t see any appeal for why anyone would like to switch (yet). For one, all disadvantages that are named (except the security aspect) can be easily fixed using additional packages (e.g. Axios, Babel, etc.). Want ES6? Use a transpiler. Need TS support? Yup, we… Edgar Rodríguez Edgar Rodríguez 3 months ago
Thanks for the nice overview, I do think is going to change the game entirely, dying to try Deno now that is 1.0.0. And hope clouds give it support quickly as well, that might play a huge part in adoption. 56
1 Ryan Hinkle Ryan Hinkle 3 months ago
57 1 I have been playing with deno for the past couple of weeks. I have enjoyed my experience. I have recently had to move all of my nodejs projects to a different computer, I realized very quickly that each project had all of there node_modules downloaded and thus why is was taking so long. Gideon Kombian Gideon Kombian 3 months ago
Good overview. I think its time to get my hands dirty :) 50
1 hüseyin nurbaki hüseyin nurbaki 2 months ago
I liked the content, thanks for sharing. 50
1 Alberto De la Hoz Alberto De la Hoz 2 months ago
I honestly think that the only person in the world that thinks Node.js needs a full replacement is Ryan Dahl.
James Galyen James Galyen 2 months ago
I like the security of using URL’s instead of a centralized package store. For instance: npm publish does not guarantee if you code comes from github, that the code in github matches what is published. This means you could also end up pulling packages that violate licensing and patents. You have 2 free stories left this month. Sign up and get an extra one for free. Deno vs. Node.js — Here are the most Important Differences Security, both under the hood, the window-object & TypeScript support Louis Petrik Louis Petrik Follow May 17 · 5 min read
Is Deno the new Node.js? Or is it just a nice alternative? In this article we will go into some important differences and features — have fun! Deno Node.js The history and story behind Deno Now already treated by some as the next big thing, and come to displace Node.js, both have one origin: Ryan Dahl Dahl worked on the Node project since 2009, but stepped back from it a few years later. In 2018 he gave the 10 Things I Regret About Node.js talk, in which he also announced Deno — a new JavaScript & TypeScript Runtime. Funfact: “Deno” is actually an anagram for “Node”. But should all Node.js developers now fear that Ryan Dahl himself has created the competition and Node will be replaced? The answer seems to be “No.”, as Dahl presented it in another talk you can find in the link Ryan Dahl about Node vs Deno Source: YouTube As Dahl himself says in this talk, Deno is still new. At the current time, more precisely in version 1.0.0. Node, on the other hand, is already a bit older — and essentially both have the same purpose. They are JavaScript Runtimes, so we can use JS outside the browser, e.g. for web servers. But how things will look like between Deno and Node in a few years, hardly anyone can tell. Deno and Node under the hood Node.js is based on C++ uses the V8 engine to execute JavaScript code. The V8 engine itself, was originally developed for Google Chrome to execute JavaScript in the browser very quickly. Meanwhile even the new Microsoft Edge version is based on V8. Deno also relies on the V8 engine, but instead of C++, Deno is also based on Rust — a programming language that is supposed to deliver similarly good performance as C++, but also places special emphasis on security: Memory access errors or buffer overflows should be avoided. And security is one thing — a common criticism of Node.js is that once a node app is running, it can easily access the file system or the network for example. Deno wants to avoid this by requiring the person running the Deno app to first allow what Deno wants to do. A good example of this is the following TS code, which we find as a getting-started example on the official Deno website: import { serve } from “https://deno.land/[email protected]/http/server.ts”; const s = serve({ port: 8000 }); for await (const req of s) {
req.respond({ body: “Hello World\n” });
}
As you can probably already see, this is a very simple web server, and we would have to execute the whole thing as below:
deno run app.ts
But here the security measures of Deno intervene, an access to the network was not yet allowed by us, therefore the following message appears:
Deno allow network accessDeno allow network access
In order for our app to be allowed to access the network, we must first give it authorization:
deno run –allow-net app.ts
Now our little web server is running successfully — but the nice thing is that we only gave approval for the network. The app still can’t access the file system just like that, we would have to allow it manually first.
Goodbye NPM, hello ES6 import
Another thing with the security of our app is NPM: Not only does using NPM often result in huge node_modules folders, but there is also the problem with node and security: If we use NPM to install a package for our node app, it can theoretically do something else on the sly.
In the past, there has been a scandal with NPM packages, which, for example, have spied out user data.
Deno does not rely on NPM at all — instead we import our libraries via the URL, as shown already in the code example above.
import { serve } from “https://deno.land/[email protected]/http/server.ts“;
The library we want to use is downloaded with it the first time it is executed and then cached:
deno module cachingdeno module caching
This can be seen when we simply copy our code for our web server and store it in a completely different location on our server or PC and execute it again. The libraries do not need to be reloaded.
If you want to read more about the dangers of NPM:
The biggest scandals of NPM
The huge tree of dependencies in the JavaScript world makes development very pleasant. But sometimes it overwhelms an…
medium.com
The window object — also outside the browser
The window object is the parent object in the browser, from which some of the most important functions for JavaScript are derived.
One of them is, for example, fetch. The native alternative to libraries such as Axios unfortunately has no place in Node.js — there you have to find a solution with libraries — but not in Deno.
Because in Deno the window object is available, as you can see here in the documentation: https://deno.land/typedoc/interfaces/window.html
And where window is, we can also use fetch, just like we would in a browser.
Let’s just try this out, and you will see you can run the following code in the browser, but also in a Deno application:
fetch(“https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1”).then((response) => response.json()) .then((json) => console.log(json));If you want to read more about the window object, check this out: The Window & Document Object In JavaScript — 7 Useful Things You Can Do With Them Why not use Vanilla JavaScript again? Here are some cool features with the document & window object that you might not…
TypeScript support out of the box
TypeScript is of course a matter of taste, celebrated by many, but also seen by some as unnecessary. But what I can say is that both sides can be happy with Deno — because Deno offers TypeScript support straight out of the box, but of course it also supports classic JavaScript. You can see this by the fact that you can easily write code with both languages, save it as .ts, or .js and simply execute it as usual with deno run. In my eyes it’s not an absolute game changer compared to Node.js, because you can easily get a TypeScript support there, but it’s definitely a cool thing. A note from Plain English Did you know that we have launched a YouTube channel? Every video we make will aim to teach you something new.
Fair Use Source: https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/deno-vs-node-js-here-are-the-most-important-differences-62b547443be1