I'm not pathologizing deno, and I have (and will continue to) consistently tried to migrate my projects to deno, first from npm, then from pnpm, and now from bun. But every single time I've tried, there has been some kind of stupid "edge case", "simple fix" issue like this that stops me in my tracks. It's not a huge deal, but the simple fact is, when I run the project using bun, it runs. When I try it using deno, it doesn't. That has been a consistent pattern every single time I've tried. Last time, deno blew up because it wasn't able to work out the IndexedDB api calls I was using without some kind of bridge/shim/environment config. These are terribly minor issues, but it's the lack of care for the details that really sours me on this stuff.
Obviously, deno should have used the version of vite that bun did which would have worked with the version of node on this machine. But even barring that, they could have dropped a little note around the instructions that says "if some packages need updates, you can run X command to do that". Even that would have allowed me to just move on, instead of forcing me to query the solution and hope for the best. Like I said, none of this is damning. It's just the exact kind of friction that prevents immediate adoption. At least for me.
For example, those two issues recently directly affected my projects:
- https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/34297
- https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/35289
Seems like the core of these issues was a Claude-coauthored PR: https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/33208
I think I'll probably just go back to normal Node because it's stable and won't break things like this between minor releases, plus it's not full-on vibe-developed like Deno and Bun.
P.S.: Deno does genuinely have good parts: built-in type checking, LSP server, formatter with sane defaults, and so on. I'm just very disappointed that they seem to be focusing less on the actual core runtime.
Ryan Dahl is assuredly a poor steward of open source software if these are the results. Node is popular because of the massive, inclusive community behind it; not because of a few rock star individuals, but for the VC mindset it's much easier to control an individual programmer than a community of them.
Only wonders are what other communities VC will try to rat fuck next, how fast do we think Evan You will speed run this exact same arc (which has already happened a dozen times in lived memory), and why does Bryan Cantrill feel like the only smart tech executive that doesn't fall into these traps?
