Fernando Doglio - Introducing Deno: A First Look at the Newest JavaScript Runtime

Fernando Doglio

Introducing Deno

A First Look at the Newest JavaScript Runtime

1st ed.

To my wife, whos been an amazing rock throughout this entire process: You make me a better person.

To my kids: You managed to fill a place in my heart I didnt know I had empty. I love you.

About the Author

Fernando Doglio

has been a part of the Software Development industry for the past 16 years. Hes worked on countless web projects, which include (among other things) APIs, Web Services, SPA, Node.js applications, PHP, Ruby, and a lot of JavaScript/HTML/CSS. He was there when SOAP hit the Web and it was all the rage, and he was also there when XML was the magic X on AJAX. Hes worked with Node.js for several years now, and hes written several books and countless articles about it, covering everything from the art of designing REST APIs with it to understanding the best design patterns and how they can be implemented with it. Now, working as a Technical Manager, hes an eager evangelist of using JavaScript for back-end development given how flexible and powerful this language is. You can find him on Twitter @deleteman.

About the Technical Reviewer

Alexander Nnakwue

has a background in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and has been a front-end developer for over 3 years working on both web and mobile technologies. He also has experience as a technical author, writer, and reviewer. He enjoys programming for the Web, and occasionally, you can also find him playing soccer. He was born in Benin City and is currently based in Lagos, Nigeria.

For the past 10 years, when back-end developers heard the words JavaScript in the back end, everyone instantly thought about Node.js.

Maybe not immediately at the start of those 10 years, but eventually it got to a point where the name was known to everyone as yet another available back-end technology based on JavaScript . And with its async I/O capabilities out of the box (because while other technologies also supported this, Node was the first one to have it as a core mechanic), it carved a portion of the market for itself.

More specifically, Node.js became almost the de facto choice for writing APIs, given the insane performance a developer could have while doing so and the great results you could achieve with very little effort.

So, why, after 10 years of evolution of the Node.js core and its surrounding ecosystem of tools and libraries, are we getting a new JavaScript runtime that is not only very similar to Node but is also meant as a better approach at solving the same problem?

The answer to that and an overview of this new project are what await you in the following chapters, so buckle up and lets talk about Deno, shall we?

Denos version 1.0 was officially released on May 13, 2020, but the idea for Deno wasnt born in 2020. In fact, although it was originally presented by its creator Ryan Dahl by that time, he had been working on a prototype of Deno for a while.

And the motivation for this was simple: he considered Node to have some fundamental flaws that couldnt be solved from within the project, so instead, a better solution would be to start over. Not to redesign the language, by any means, after all, the issues between Ryan and Node werent about JavaScript, but rather about the internal architecture of Node and how it managed to solve some of the requirements.