Title origin: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/friendship-ended-with-mudasir

> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem.

Bad news (well not news, this happened a while ago): https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/16/microsoft-github-agrees-...

I helped Deno bring the Standard Library to v1 [as a contractor] and have always loved the team and philosophy. But these days I’m saddened by what seems to be their slow decline into obscurity. After the layoffs, there seems to be no roadmap, no comms, etc. I’m just so curious as to where they’re heading and still hope the best for it. I’ve always liked Deno more than Node and Bun.

With LLMs becoming prevalent, it seems people are “quitting” their projects more quickly. Not necessarily a bad thing, but just shows that the opportunity cost is too high right now if you’re building the wrong thing. Deno isn’t the wrong thing, but LLMs don’t reach for it and that’s a huge blow right now.

Deno is still an easy pick for me because of its built-in test-runner (deno test), linter (deno lint), and type checker (deno check). I've used many different npm packages for these things in previous projects and I have no idea what the new hotness and proper configuration is for all of these things in a new node project, so I really value the simplicity of Deno for it all. Also JSR and Deno for publishing Typescript libraries is still so much easier than setting up a Typescript node project and configuring it to publish compiled code, and it gets you documentation pages generated from your tsdoc comments too, which I never knew how to do outside of JSR.

I know Bun is kinda not the fan favorite right now with the Anthropic acquisition and the Rust re-write drama and such, but on every one of the dimensions listed in this article, I like Bun better than either Node or Deno.

I never left node.

The thing with being around for a while is the ability to seat on the porch, watching the adventurers' caravans pass by, once upon a traveller in one of those, now only the ones that actually make the way back into town matter to actually have a second look and talk to the strangers.

Turns out the 'boring enterprise runtime' spent its time actually shipping stability while everyone else was chasing the next shiny runtime hype cycle.

I am not sure about deno not being innovative - I've recently started using deno for it's new desktop app support only (https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/)

Oh look, we’re consolidating again. My only gripe with it was that it wouldn’t directly run Typescript. Other than that it just felt a little ... antiquated.

Bun seems popular too, what would be reasons to choose it?

> Why? Just strip the types bro, I know you can! Let me sign a deal with the devil!

> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem. Nobody wants more Microsoft.

The reason Node disallows this has nothing to do with TypeScript being owned by Microsoft, it's because there's no guarantee the TSConfig settings used in the library you're pulling in match the ones in your project. A mismatch would mean you would get type errors inside the library code (assuming you're doing some form of type-checking in your application, otherwise what's the point of even using TypeScript).

> No TypeScript packages mean I need to find the latest churnware slop to bundle my stuff.

The TypeScript compiler itself comes with everything you need for this. See: https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#declaration

There are other advantages to bundling, but it's not strictly necessary if all you care about is publishing TS on NPM. Declaration files solve the problem by supplying the resolved types of the publicly exposed identifiers. Also has the added advantage of not locking out plain JS consumers.

I wanted Deno to succeed to have a single standardised toolchain, but with Deno having its own APIs you'd effectively have to architect your application to be a "Deno app" and it created two different ecosystems. The best way to make your app portable would be to use the provided Node APIs, cutting a lot of the value from Deno.

There are good reasons to stay positive about deno. Some of them: https://lobste.rs/s/a9kwzv/friendship_ended_with_deno_now_no...

I want to run my node project on Deno for performance testing, but Deno has problems when executing OpenSSL in a child process.

It's great that we now have 3 major JS server environments: Node.js, Deno and Bun. The competition keeps them all in check.

Although I was keen to get involved in Deno in the beginning and I'm a fan of Ryan Dahl, I just couldn't shake my preference for vanilla JavaScript; it was already the case before LLMs took over, but now even more so after LLMs. But I like that Deno is an option which users of my open source projects can use.

That said, Deno deserves the credit for making TypeScript as painless as possible. Juggling different Node.js and tsc versions and tsconfig versions was a major pain in the neck. I like how Deno forces a specific TypeScript version. None of that nonsense.

I wonder what the future of all three is mode bun and deno, their original goal has always been to be able to code in one language across frontend and backend, and typescript itself is a hell of a good language too.

But now that people seldom even look at the code, does it even matter? Our shared language now is English - across tests, frontend, backend, product briefs and design systems.

I have written a crap ton of node code before, because I liked it, but now I do everything in specialized stacks where each tech is chosen to best fit its environment. Backend - use Go, frontend - react/svelte/custom ,game simulation code - C#.

I just debate what would be best fit with an agent, do a few pilots to prove it and just go. Languages I’ve never coded in are super fast to execute - just insist on following best practice, modern conventions and do some spot checks against o(n) problems, architecture and parallelism - and it works, and vibe coded codebase with strict linting rules vastly outperforms fine tuned code in a shared language (node).

I honestly don’t see a bright future for them, and tbh I was surprised at Claude’s migration _to_ bun - why not just make the jump to something like ocamel that would let their agents have even more performance, context and linting tools, but I guess if they did it once the will do it again when they feel like it.

if you want to try a new runtime oam.js is focused on TypeScript & MCP servers.

I never found Deno compelling enough compared to Node.

Bun was promising, but as long as they don't fix their http GET implementation to accept the request body, its broken for me.

Note: Many real world tools like Elasticsearch's GET /_search with a JSON query DSL is one example. It breaks Axios. Many custom infrastructure tools expect it.

Advertising as node compatible and having this breaking change is undesirable. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Love the site!

You need better friends

Node is really good, and whatever thing that comes out outside of it will eventually be engulfed by it. Node is the safe bet :).