[HN Gopher] Deno raises $21M ___________________________________________________________________ Deno raises $21M Author : 0xedb Score : 389 points Date : 2022-06-21 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (deno.com) (TXT) w3m dump (deno.com) | [deleted] | Zababa wrote: | > Cold start (time to first response, ms) O(100) O(1000) O(10000) | | I think ~100 ~1000 ~10000 would be clearer than using the big O | notation, since this has nothing to do with fuinctions. | vaishnavsm wrote: | Agreed! I'm pretty sure they're just using O(x) to mean on the | order of x, since big O of any constant is the same (unless | that's their point??? :O) | laputan_machine wrote: | I genuinely don't even understand it. I was either taught | wrong, learned wrong or this doesn't make sense. O(100) is | constant time, so it's no different to saying O(1) or whatever, | I've only ever used O to talk about how we care about the time | complexity of a function, e.g. comparing linear time to | quadratic time. 1 is the same as 100, irrelevant. | LudwigNagasena wrote: | If it's big O notation, it makes no sense because | O(10000)=O(1000)=O(100)=O(1). | koshergweilo wrote: | I think they're trying to communicate that those are worst | case latency numbers. You're correct in that formal use of | Big O notation doesn't distinguish constants. | csmpltn wrote: | It's _that_ easy to raise money these days, at the 10% | inflation mark. Spin up a webpage full of nonsense promises and | they 'll come chasing after you to take their cash. | pdpi wrote: | I would read ~100 to mean "approximately 100", while O(100) to | me reads like "measured in the hundreds". So 200-600ms cold | starts are O(100) and 3-7s cold starts are O(1000). | koshergweilo wrote: | I'm not sure, I'm pretty sure they're trying to communicate | that these are worst case estimates. ~100 seems like it's | communicating average case estimates (big theta notation), | which isn't really the same thing | chrismsimpson wrote: | Interesting raise. I leave the front marketing page of Deno | Deploy open in my browser for a few moments and I get the | ubiquitous "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it | may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." | | Says it all about the state of the JavaScript ecosystem really. | caust1c wrote: | The color changing on this page gives me a migraine: | | https://deno.com/deploy | | I like Deno in principle, but I'd love to see how Slack, Github | and Netlify are using it. | lucacasonato wrote: | If you have "prefers-reduced-motion" set to true in your | browser / OS, the animation will stop :) | madeofpalk wrote: | Unfortunately browser's don't really give you an easy way to | control this. Changing system-wide settings just because one | website is bad is quite the ask ask. | lagrange77 wrote: | > I like Deno in principle, but I'd love to see how Slack, | Github and Netlify are using it. | | https://docs.netlify.com/netlify-labs/experimental-features/... | | _All this dynamic processing happens in a secure runtime based | on Deno directly from the worldwide network edge location | closest to each user._ | cloudyglider wrote: | Weird... it's having the same affect on me, something about | slowly fading to white background is making me flinch. Is this | a known phenomenon? | yccs27 wrote: | I suspect that it basically confuses your brain because it | tries to adjust the "white balance" so that the background | becomes normal white. But the background is just saturated | enough and changing so quickly that it just can't follow. | airstrike wrote: | As a second data point, I added the same effect to my blog | back in, I don't know, 2002 and all my friends complained | about getting a headache as well, so I turned it off | | For some reason it never had that same negative effect on me | kevsim wrote: | Funny thing is after looking at it for a bit, I'd _swear_ HN is | changing colors now. | synu wrote: | Same, and a bit of a persistent queasy feeling. I think it's | something to do with how it's slightly off white but pulsing, | so your brain tries to cancel it out. | | It reminds me of the feeling after surfing when you lie in | bed with your eyes closed and still feel the waves going up | and down. | asdfasdfdsfa wrote: | Leave it to hacker news for such a dramatic comment about a | trivial design choice | caust1c wrote: | Yeah I love making prospective customers feel pain too. | | /s | bowsamic wrote: | The world doesn't exist to cater to your weird specific | thing that gives you a headache | danuker wrote: | The rank of the root comment says others are displeased | as well. | asadlionpk wrote: | Not as dramatic as you but it does feel a bit weird looking at | it. | qweqwerwerwerwr wrote: | are there real-world, commercial products actually running on | """serverless""" architecture? | | no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no | application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and | easier with regular tools | golergka wrote: | There's plenty of real-world, commercial products which do not | get extremely high loads but earn much more money on each | request. They're mostly in B2B without sexy names and media | coverage, though. | [deleted] | nikanj wrote: | Hot take: investors really are stupid enough to think | "servers/datacenters are a massive cost for large companies. A | serverless solution should save them lots of money" | wperron wrote: | It's not a hot take, it's just a bad take, and a complete | failure to understand the value proposition of these types of | offerings (and why we're seeing so many of them pop up these | days) | lghh wrote: | > are there real-world, commercial products actually running on | """serverless""" architecture? | | Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I have | worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%. | | > no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no | application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and | easier with regular tools | | Considering you have to ask if there are _any_ products running | in a serverless environment, I would imagine you need more | exposure to the concept before you make such a large judgement | on it. | capableweb wrote: | > Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I | have worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%. | | If you can answer (for legal or other reasons you might not | be able to): What kind of monthly bills did your setup have | and how many req/s did you serve (in lack of a better | metric)? It'd also be useful to know average min/max response | time if that's something you remember. | | I wish that was a good way of evaluating "performance / | price" but that's really hard... If someone know a better way | to frame the question regarding price, it would be very | helpful. | lghh wrote: | I can't list that, but both companies migrated to | serverless and both companies are glad they did. | | There is more than "raw dollar amount on monthly bill" to | account for in cost, as well. For one, there's stability | and the toll that takes on both your team and your | customers. Not saying non-serverless apps are not stable by | nature, but I've now been part of two teams that have seen | the same types of benefits and those benefits line up with | the "sales pitch" benefits. | qweqwerwerwerwr wrote: | what was the product and the scale then? | lghh wrote: | I'd rather not list my last two companies or their scale, | but I can assure you they are real companies that exist, | have users, and make money. I'm not sure why I even would | be asked to. | ArrayBoundCheck wrote: | I'm not particularly interested in serverless but my | understanding is a developer doesn't need to know the server | configuration and drops some code in. The service figures out | how to route the domain to code and handle the storage, | caching, etc | | I rather know my configuration and use one big server with the | static files on a CDN | jppope wrote: | Yes, there are many real-world completely serverless products | and architectures. I've been working exclusively on serverless | architectures for many years now, I have no plans on going back | to provisioning servers or working with containers. | dangoor wrote: | It depends on what you categorize as "serverless". I wrote | about how Khan Academy is built on essentially serverless | architecture and has millions of monthly users: | | https://blog.khanacademy.org/the-original-serverless-archite... | msoad wrote: | Running little processes on the server without the VM/K8s | expensive abstraction has a lot of potential. I'm sure Deno will | do great! At least this way of deploying web apps has a lot of | potential. | whatever1 wrote: | Isn't this what an operating system is doing by default? | msoad wrote: | I should say "untrusted code" to be more specific. | pseudosavant wrote: | As a Deno fan I was surprised to learn that the free tier for | Deno Deploy includes 100k requests per day and 100GB of bandwidth | monthly. I know I'll be trying it out now. | benatkin wrote: | I think Deno Deploy and using Deno on fly.io could be a | powerful combo. Deno has some advantages that definitely lend | themselves to having control of your entire MicroVMs. An app | could easily be split between serverless-friendly and non- | serverless-friendly parts of the stack by using both together. | mkroman wrote: | > Up to 10ms CPU time per request | | So less than 17 minutes of CPU time per day - not a lot, but | also not nothing.. But at 10ms per request, what would one use | it for? Just server-side rendering for something simple? | crowlKats wrote: | proper applications as well. example is the https://deno.land | website has an average CPU time of 6ms. CPU time means it | doesnt include any IO bound operations, so ie doing a fetch | request wont really contribute to the CPU time. | [deleted] | lxe wrote: | The business end here is Deno Deploy - a heroku-like. That's what | the "startup" behind the funding is. The tech is in service of | that. | TazeTSchnitzel wrote: | > Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute | abstraction [...] | | This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the | return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again? | scarface74 wrote: | Virtual machines are still the abstraction. Each Lambda/Fargate | (serverless Docker) runs in its own VM. | thegeomaster wrote: | I changed my view on this--I hated how things were going full | circle. But in reality, human civilization loves overdoing a | particular direction and then reverts to the mean. You see this | with the economy, moral fashions, everything. | | I am an optimist in that I (have started to) believe that this | slowly allows us to converge on better solutions for | everything. | | PHP was easy to set up, easy to host, easy to understand and | easy to build stuff with, but it resulted in an unmaintainable | mess over the long run. | | Then Node was all of that, but JS was a better language than | PHP. Then Node grew warts in the form of the clutter that is | npm, then it grew complex build systems and unstable libraries. | | Now there's Deno. It uses TypeScript by default, which is a | surprisingly useful and productive language, it rethinks some | things, it's much more secure by default, and now we're back at | the PHP-level easiness to host using Deno Deploy. | | We've ended up with an overall better solution and it only took | us 20 years :) | speed_spread wrote: | We didn't go back far enough, CGI is still where it's at. | Spivak wrote: | I mean CGI still lives on just moved up the stack a bit | with WSGI and Rack. | bbatchelder wrote: | We're there again with WASM and WAGI. | | https://www.fermyon.com/blog/wasm-wasi-wagi | 0des wrote: | perl did nothing wrong | keyle wrote: | whilst technically correct, perl hackers on the other | hand... | brtkdotse wrote: | It's amusing to see a whole generation of senior developers | ("senior" as in 5+ years of experience) that haven't | experienced web development without React[0] and who proceed to | reinvent PHP/ASP.NET/RoR. | | [0] Used here as shorthand for "modern js driven development" | jacobr wrote: | Another developer here who's been around for the tech you | mention. | | The evolution has been 2 steps forward but 1 step back. It's | how many complex systems evolve and it's fine. Just because | you see that some problems/solutions resemble what you saw 10 | years ago doesn't mean nothing was improved along the way. | dgb23 wrote: | Personally I've been using both PHP and Node/React | extensively and let me tell you there are very good reasons | for the React/Node/JS ecosystem to exist and they are | decidedly not borne out of ignorance of the PHP ecosystem. | Ryan Dahl (inventor of Node and Deno) said that he created | (paraphrasing) "the PHP of this generation" and React was | invented within the probably the largest PHP shop to date. | | PHP is an unsafe, slow by default (execution model - the | language itself fast), hard to use well, clunky, limiting and | bloated language that is kept together by duct tape and the | incredible effort and ingenuity of it's open source community | by educating developers and improving/cleaning up the | language at full blast, unfortunately often by breaking | backwards compatibility. | | Whether JS (including Deno) is a good alternative or the | right answer is up for debate. But people who try to mimic | some of the benefits of PHP in the JS ecosystem are not doing | so accidentally or because of lack of experience. | efdee wrote: | We could really do without this kind of snark here. Not only | is it condescending, but it's also just plain wrong, either | on purpose or due to the writer not being familiar with the | subject at hand. | dntrkv wrote: | Such a tiring take... | | Nobody is reinventing PHP or RoR development. What is | happening is the community taking all our favorite parts of | these stacks and combining and implementing them in ways that | facilitate a dev experience that we could only have dreamed | of back in the PHP/RoR days. | | - Senior dev that started off in the PHP and then RoR days | manigandham wrote: | Back in RoR days? It's still here with new releases | offering modern features. ASP.NET is even more cutting | edge. | edgyquant wrote: | Yep totally agree with this. | | - Engineering Lead who got his start in PHP/ASP(pre .net) | and loves the modern ecosystem despite its flaws | nonethewiser wrote: | You seem to be suggesting the Deno team has <= 5 years | experience. Else, who is recreating PHP/ASP.NET/RoR? | christophilus wrote: | Been writing web stuff since before the dot-com bust. Preact | + TypeScript is probably my favorite front-end programming | combo yet. I liked VB6 and C# WinForms, though, so maybe I'm | an invalid sample. | sealthedeal wrote: | Just like GoLang, I only wanna use this because that dinosaur is | SO CUTE!! hahaha | spicyusername wrote: | Is the intent of this product to compete with something like | Netlify? | crowlKats wrote: | No, Netlify actually uses Deno to some degree: | https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-serverless-compute-w... | spicyusername wrote: | Right, but the $21M of funding seems to be for Deno Deploy, | the product, not Deno, the CLI. | crowlKats wrote: | The wording in that blogpost might be a bit off, here it is | more in-depth: https://deno.com/blog/netlify-edge- | functions-on-deno-deploy | | Netlify is using Deploy | haolez wrote: | I think it's a good opportunity for Meteor, which is a very | interesting framework but with some technical debt, to jump ship | on Deno and start fresh again. Maybe they could try replacing | their in-house synchronization mechanisms by managed services | such as AppSync. Randomly wondering :) | ChrisArchitect wrote: | I'm not deep in Node world but I use it and see it being used, | who is using Deno out there? Have there been some notable/major | ship jumps? Or is it not that kind of situation (perception from | when it came on the scene is that's exactly what it is, | constantly trying to woo Node devs over). And also there's alot | of recognizable brand competition out there from things like | Cloudflare, Netlify (but they're an investor in this?), Vercel on | fire the last year or two, and not to mention the big FAANG | types. Again, who's using this? | marcofatica wrote: | Slack is the biggest I know of https://deno.com/blog/slack | wperron wrote: | Netlify, Supabase and Slack whitelabelling Deno Deploy for | starters, I'm sure there are others out there self-hosting as | well | ChrisArchitect wrote: | See now that's interesting - All of those have very out-there | brand reach and recognition but who knew they were using | Deno, nobody heh. Okay, then, so it's a bit under the radar | but ticking away down there, hence the raise. Fairplay. | wperron wrote: | If you're not following those companies' offerings then it | stands to reason you haven't heard about it but all three | of them did broadcast pretty widely that they were using | Deno, I would assume quite a few people were aware of this. | jacobr wrote: | From my horizon the most significant adoption has been Netlify | edge functions. So not exactly ship jumping, but adjacent and | growing spaces. | IshKebab wrote: | I think it's still pretty early days but it's clearly far | superior to Node so I think we'll see more and more people use | it. | | The biggest barrier is the library ecosystem. JS's insane | packaging history means a lot of NPM libraries don't work | seamlessly with Deno even if they don't use Node APIs. | markandrewj wrote: | I imagine you are already aware, but the creator of Node, Ryan | Dahl, is also the creator for Deno. He is trying to create a | new language which integrates what he learned from building | Node. | Johannesbourg wrote: | Somebody doesn't understand O notation. | m00dy wrote: | I also didn't get it. | | so I think in their notaion O(10) has greater magnitude than | (>) O(1) | naniwaduni wrote: | You're expected to read it out loud (in English), where one | of the conventional readings of O(f) is "order of f". | Conveniently "order of 100" is usually taken to mean _not_ | asymptotic behavior bounded by a constant multiple of 100, | but a range within an order of magnitude or so of 100. | | Which is to say, they're saying Deno has a cold start time of | ~100 ms, package size ~10M, a physical machine can support | ~1k instances. | pdpi wrote: | They're abusing the notation, but doing so in a way that's | perfectly clear. | LudwigNagasena wrote: | What does O(100) mean in the comparison table? | selljamhere wrote: | It's used as a comparison to the alternative, O(1000), an | order-of-magnitude improvement. | dragonwriter wrote: | I think they are using O(x) as a shorthand for | antilog10(log10(x)+-0.5). | | Or, in simpler terms, O(x) = "approximately x, to one | significant figure" | sfink wrote: | "on the order of 100ms" | | It's misusing big-O notation for "order of magnitude", but | after I initially tripped over it, it seemed clear enough. | [deleted] | sergiotapia wrote: | Where's the angle for the investors - what will Deno do to | produce the returns necessary for such a high amount? I thought | Deno would be the eradication of Node and bring stability to | Javascript. From the outside it seems to be firmly on it's way to | being just another Zeit/Vercel. :( | jhgg wrote: | Deno deploy seems cool and all, but I haven't seen any great | rationale for using their service over say Cloudflare Workers. | kjksf wrote: | As someone who dabbled with both workers and Deno Deploy: Deno | Deploy actually works. | | I was very excited about the idea of workers but their tooling | is (or at least was when I tried it last) abysmal, buggy and | hard to understand. To this day I don't know how to setup a | basic dev vs. production in workers.toml. Local debugging was | buggy for naked domains (even found a GitHub issue for it that | languished for months with no bugfix or clear explanation / | workaround) and very slow. | | Great idea killed by poor dev tooling. | | Deno deploy is the opposite of that: deploys are instant and | it's obvious how to deploy. You can develop and test locally. | | Cloudflare released wrangler v2 (which dropped rust for node) | and maybe it's better now but the one experience I had with | wrangler v2 was trying to deploy a small static website (pages) | and it failed due to their backend throwing 50x errors. | tick_tock_tick wrote: | Yeah unless I'm missing something isn't this just a stand alone | company offering roughly workers? | mrkurt wrote: | This is an open source JavaScript runtime with a hosted | business model. Deno is great. Deno Deploy is a reasonable | way for them to make money. | threatofrain wrote: | CloudFlare workers is on my radar because of an ecology of | other "edge" products that are in the works or already | released. That's what Deno would need to catchup on to be | on the table for discussion for me. Otherwise it remains a | toy I use in my spare time (which I do enjoy at the | moment). | mattlondon wrote: | You could say the same about AWS Azure, and GCP. | | Competition is good. | jhgg wrote: | Competition is great - sure, but I want to know what Deno | gives me over its competitors. | jbaczuk wrote: | Deno Deploy, how is this different than lambda functions, or | elastic beanstalk? | danielovichdk wrote: | I read half and thought "how did this get any funding". | | Who validated this idea and with what measures? | LAC-Tech wrote: | Does this mean we can finally get a REPL where a file can be | loaded, modified, then reloaded, without having to restart the | whole thing? | | Seriously my biggest pet peeve with both deno and node.js. In | every other REPL I've used this is basic functionality. When I | talk about this to JS people they look at me like I'm from mars. | alexwebb2 wrote: | JS modules can produce side effects on load. Does that present | an obstacle to that kind of REPL pattern? | LAC-Tech wrote: | I don't think so. | | Most repls use a special in repl keyword to accomplish this. | | For some reason the JS community can't move past "but modules | are special". Ocaml has modules too and the repl can reload | stuff from a file no problem. | stephen wrote: | Naive question, but is that dictated in the spec? Probably? | | Just wondering that, since Deno is rewriting all of npm | anyway, it would have been a great time to revisit some of | these historical script-y design decisions, to make | JavaScript/TypeScript-at-scale suck less. | | Granted, probably too late now, but as-is neither of Deno's | url-based imports or sandboxed-by-default changes has seemed | worth the migration cost. | | But, if they also made something like "everything hot reloads | for free" level ergonomic/platform changes, then yeah, I'd be | hopping over. | kirankp89 wrote: | I've never been interested in JS as I mostly work in C++ but the | ease of install/use of Deno over Node made me actually want to | try it. It's nice to have access to a bunch of web tech with a | single binary. Very excited to see where this project goes! | mmastrac wrote: | I played with an early version of Deno a few years back and it | was already way more comfortable to use than node. It's a real | counterexample to second-system syndrome. | | The only reason I didn't continue was a lack of ARM support. | zackangelo wrote: | Surprised this is the case because I use their Rust v8 bindings | on an ARM laptop almost every day. Have you tried building it | from source? | mmastrac wrote: | It was a few years back and I was mainly playing with a few | early projects. I was very productive, but wanted to target | my Raspberry Pi and it just wasn't there. I ended up going | 100% rust instead. | mattlondon wrote: | There are still no RPi builds as far as I am aware, which | is a shame as there are now Mac silicon builds so not sure | what the hold up is. I do wonder if there are.more | Raspberry Pi's out there than M1/M2 Macs :) | | Someone is doing the builds here - been using them and seem | ok: https://github.com/LukeChannings/deno-arm64 | crowlKats wrote: | The M1 builds are made manually by us, as github doesnt | provide any runners. the same problem does apply for | linux arm, however we don't have any arm linux systems | any one of the members use; and building on a pi is a no- | go, as that can take 70+ minutes, so that would make our | release cycle a lot more complicated. Either way, we are | investigating potential possibilities besides waiting for | github to have runners available | pcl wrote: | Have you tried building in a rpi virtual machine on a | Mac? I have no idea what the performance would look like, | but it'd be easy enough to try, especially since you are | already managing your own max builders. | | I want to say I followed these instructions for doing so | recently: | | https://gist.github.com/plembo/c4920016312f058209f5765cb9 | a3a... | beaker52 wrote: | What made it "way more comfortable" for you? | DangitBobby wrote: | I had a very different experience. I very much wanted to make | it work, but trying to use it with existing npm packages and | import maps was incredibly painful, and I ultimately switched | over to node for that project. | keb_ wrote: | Haven't tried import maps, but so long as the npm package | uses ES Modules and doesn't rely on Node specific APIs, you | should be good to go. | vlunkr wrote: | This question is going to make me sound like a jerk, but why do | you want to write your back-end in JS? Deno looks like a great | improvement over node.js, but I don't feel compelled to use it. | It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance | promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we | have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant back- | end options, and even older choices like Ruby and Python have | continued to improve. | | Seems like the standard arguments would be that developers | already know JS, and that you can share code with the browser. I | don't find these highly compelling. | | EDIT: I haven't learned typescript yet, based on the replies, it | seems like that could be a good reason to choose it. Seems like a | nice middle-ground between typical scripting and compiled | languages. | Escapado wrote: | I think developers knowing JS/TS is a highly compelling | argument given the fact that most companies are struggling to | find any devs at all. I would argue finding Rust/Go/Elixir | developers is going to be _a lot_ harder for a lot of companies | than finding JS developers. | | Also then sufficiently proficient frontend Devs have an easy in | into backend development which has turned out to be a very good | thing at 5 different companies I have worked for in the last 4 | years. | | In addition to that not every backend or service needs much | performance. I have written quite a few services that get hit | maybe 3 or 4 times a minute at best and Node was great for | that. Actually I have yet to work anywhere where performance | was limited by the language choice and not by architectural | decisions or inconsidered use of databases and data structures. | I am not saying this does not exist but it does not mirror my | experience with the majority of companies at all. | | I'd also say that despite npm and dependency hell being a real | problem there is a vast ecosystem of packages out there. I know | python has that going for it too. But Elixir is much less | developed in that regard - simply by being less popular. | quickthrower2 wrote: | Hard to out my finger on a single reason for it but I prefer it | for hobby projects. | | Part of the reason is I am already using node for tooling for | the front end. | | It is less powerful than say C# for example in multitasking - | but for hobby projects that rarely matters. | | Typescript makes a big difference. | | There is a lot of community support: stackoverflow, npm | packages etc. Every SDK has a JS version. | | It is fast enough for my needs. | | NextJS is another good reason. | presentation wrote: | Sharing code with the browser can be really sweet. At a past | job we used TypeScript, and I had whipped up some shared types | that our API was forced to conform to, and that automatically | generated a strongly typed API client for the frontend to use. | Sure, you can do that with some other protocol or server like | GraphQL/Hasura/writing up a JSON schema, but it was pretty | sweet that A) any of our engineers could figure out how to make | the endpoints they needed to implement a new feature, B) these | types could generally be inferred from the actual API | implementation without having to explicitly write types out | which completely eliminated bugs around API misuse with minimal | extra code, and C) all of the code we wrote followed the same | linters, formatters, idioms, and utilities (fetching, logging, | error handling, and so on). There are projects out now that | wrap up a lot of what I had done like tRPC [1], as a testament | to the value of the shared abstractions. | | [1] https://trpc.io/ | rr888 wrote: | To me its very powerful to have the same developers do both | front end and back end. With modern frameworks its probably | easier for front end devs to do back end work than | Rust/Go/Elixir devs to dirty themselves with JS. So even though | ts is suboptimal it allows one language, one set of tools and | developers. | flohofwoe wrote: | I may be the odd one out, but for me node.js (and hopefully in | the future Deno) isn't about the backend, but instead it's a | pretty nice scripting environment for tooling and automation. | I've been using mainly Python for this in the past, but got | burned out quite a bit by the python2=>3 transition. | | (but still: don't underestimate the raw performance of V8, for | many things it's definitely good enough) | mmcnl wrote: | I completely understand what you're saying, but Python is a | lot better now. You don't have to worry about Python 2 | anymore and the tooling is a lot better as well (Black, | Flake8, Poetry are all really nice). | mrkurt wrote: | I like TypeScript and would like to write backends in | TypeScript. | | I'm coming around on Elixir. | | I never want to write Go that interacts with a database again. | | Rust seems complicated. I don't think I'm smart or committed | enough to get anywhere with rust. | norman784 wrote: | > Rust seems complicated. I don't think I'm smart or | committed enough to get anywhere with rust. | | Rust is a bit rough yet to do the front and backend | development, but IMHO it will catch in a year or two. Also | for backend rust now with (actix and axum) looks pretty | similar to expressjs, so you will feel like home there, but | for the frontend there's still no killer framework nor a | settled architecture that fits better rust model. | kbd wrote: | > I never want to write Go that interacts with a database | again. | | Why? I've been using sqlx and it seems fine. | cdelsolar wrote: | yeah, i'm using pgx and it rocks | christophilus wrote: | Sqlx is the way. | timmg wrote: | You're kinda stuck writing JS on the frontend. The (only) | advantage of also using it on the backend is that you can share | code. In some cases, I could see that being compelling. | | FWIW, I think Typescript would make an even stronger case. And | I think(?) that's one thing Deno is trying to do. | Hamcha wrote: | I use Deno from time to time, and in my opinion more than a | back-end language it's a really powerful scripting language. | Being able to reference libraries by URL and the Go-like | standard library mixed with Typescript async makes it a breeze | to develop simple one-use CLI tools! | mattlondon wrote: | It uses typescript predominantly, and only compiles down to | JavaScript. (I think you can code in plain JavaScript directly | but I don't think anyone would want to do that) | | The benefits are in my mind not that you can share code | directly but more that the std lib is the same (mostly) between | backend and frontend. This means no mental context switching | for developers. | | The other bonus is that typescript is just such a lovely thing | to code in. Expressive, universal and ubiquitous, performant - | modern JS is a joy to use (...if you don't need to use NPM... | If you need to use NPM at all then it is a shit show) | digitxpc wrote: | I've written up an at-scale production backend in Node.js and | can very much stand by the decision to use Node over Elixir or | Go (which I was considering at the time). I think | fundamentally, the power of a JS-based backend is its | pragmatism--it's not the best at most things, but it comes very | close to it in so many categories that it's a safe option for a | lot of use cases. | | > It seems like people jumped to node based on some performance | promises that didn't really pay off (IMO). And since then, we | have newer options like Rust, Go, and Elixir as performant | back-end options, and even older choices like Ruby and Python | have continued to improve. | | I'd agree that Node.js performance is generally not the best | reason to be writing a backend in it since a static language | will often yield better performance, but for the amount of | dynamic power you get, it's extremely performant by default[1]. | The next most performant dynamic language for I/O is, like you | said, probably Erlang/Elixir, but V8 is generally understood to | have better CPU-bound performance than BEAM. | | [1]: https://benchmarksgame- | team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... | | > Seems like the standard arguments would be that developers | already know JS, and that you can share code with the browser. | I don't find these highly compelling. | | I've found that developers already knowing JS is a very | practical reason, if not ideological. I'm in a team with a lot | of generalists who like to work full-stack, and being able to | use the same mental models and syntax is a lot of cognitive | load lifted off our shoulders. It also doubles the hiring pool | of people who can hit the ground running on the backend, | because now anyone who has experience with JS on the frontend | can jump over to the backend with relatively little training. | | The other key reason for a backend in JS is that the community | is extremely large, which means that a lot of the | troubleshooting I'd have to do in languages with smaller | communities is done for me by someone who was kind enough to | post a workaround online. This saves me a lot of time and | energy, as does the plethora of packages. | brundolf wrote: | And the performance argument isn't even just about CPU time, | right? The fact that JS is heavily event-friendly, and all of | its IO APIs are non-blocking by default, gives it an | automatic advantage over busy-waiting languages like Python, | and also languages where concurrency means writing threads | manually. If your web server spends most of its time on IO | (network, DB, file system), as many do, JS acts as a | lightweight task-delegator to a highly parallel and | performant native runtime. | | I haven't worked on a large-scale JS back-end myself, but | this is the case I've heard others make | golergka wrote: | I've written backends using C#, PHP back in the day, a little | bit of Go, Java and naked SQL, and I prefer Typescript language | and npm ecosystem, hands down. May be not for writing highload | distributed systems that are critical at RAM & CPU, but IO- | heavy business logic where managing requirements and their | changes is the hardest challenge, it's a godsend. | pictur wrote: | deno seems like a great project that solves problems that don't | actually exist | femiagbabiaka wrote: | Are there any sources for the claims made in the chart on the | second half of the page or are they theoretical? Seems really | cool in theory! | potamic wrote: | Interesting how this will play out. It's an ambitious goal to | consolidate client side and server side javascript ecosystems | which is quite fragmented today. On the other hand, this may only | increase fragmentation further by introducing another target to | develop for (wait for transpilers that can automagically convert | between deno and node code). I will always look at javascript as | this problem kid that cannot get its shit together in life, | perpetually chasing the romance of utopia. | jitl wrote: | There is already a system for building a NPM node package from | a Deno package, called dnt (deno to node). It's maintained by | some Deno team members. Here's a blog post they wrote about | porting "Oak" (a deno HTTP server framework) to Node: | https://deno.com/blog/dnt-oak | | The nice thing about Deno conceptually, is that it's much more | similar to the browser platform than node is. It uses ES6 only, | has things like `fetch` built-in by default, and generally | follows browser standards around interfaces like Request, | Response, etc. Instead of needing a complicated build process | to make Node code work on the browser, now we have a | complicated build process to make Deno/Browser code work on | Node. -\\_(tsu)_/- | melony wrote: | Can the same build pipelines be reused for CF/Fastly workers? | The DX for workers is horrible with multiple buggy Wrangler | implementations and zero observability into deployed workers. | capableweb wrote: | Not to take away from the rest of your message, I thought you | wanted to get up to speed on that `fetch` is now available in | nodejs core since version 17 or something like that (think it | got included early this year). | jitl wrote: | I think this requires the `--experimental-fetch` command- | line argument (per | https://nodejs.org/tr/blog/release/v17.5.0/), so I don't | think it qualifies as "by default". | wging wrote: | That's an old blog post; the current release is 18.4.0, | which supports `fetch` without a command-line argument. | You do get this warning the first time it's invoked, | though: (node:340760) | ExperimentalWarning: The Fetch API is an experimental | feature. This feature could change at any time | (Use `node --trace-warnings ...` to show where the | warning was created) | | (some later blog posts that mention fetch being enabled- | by-default and in the global scope are | https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/v18-release- | announc... and | https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v18.0.0/) | wdb wrote: | Yeah, but you could use `undici`-package for older Node | version as it is being used to provide this experimental | Fetch in Node 17+ | the_gipsy wrote: | What about using an npm package in deno? | wperron wrote: | Has been possible (and surprinsingly easy) for a while | through CDNs like skypack or esm.sh | danielvaughn wrote: | It's what I kind of love about it though - the JS ecosystem is | Neverland. | tambourine_man wrote: | https://xkcd.com/927/ | ricardonunez wrote: | I knew that xkcd before I even clicked. They should update it | and increase the number dramatically. | tambourine_man wrote: | It could store a cookie and increment the number every time | you see the comic | keyle wrote: | I think we're in the 100s by now, within the javascript | ecosystem alone! :) | thdxr wrote: | there is a group formed including Deno that will work together | to try to maintain standards + compatibility | | https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-the-wintercg/ | asien wrote: | Funny because I don't see how they can make any money from | this.... | | Plus outside of << Running Typescript >> or shitting on npm / | Isaac Ryan has so far solved none of the problems that exist in | the node ecosystem... | | Deno is node.js all over again , with its team lacking any sort | of vision of maturity dependencies all over the place , but this | time.... decentralized ! | | The language still doesn't include the fundamentals library or | providing an homogenous api design for I/O ... it's just | baffling... | | I find that fascinating since the whole motto for Deno was | Consistency, Ecosystem and Performance.... | | I'm a node.js guy but if I need performance or design a large | project I go with something fast and professional like | Rust/Go/Kotlin. | | When I look at the ecosystem of JavaScript it's frightening to | see how little coders care compared to Go or Kotlin and how | outdated in terms of design the code often is... Even the source | of node it's just a bunch of function from pre-ES4... | | At least I'm happy for him he could finally cash out on sequoia | money and become a SV millionaire like everyone else ! | latchkey wrote: | Attack the technology all you want as those are some valid | criticisms, but the sarcastic personal attack at the end seems | unnecessary. Imagine how he'd feel reading that. Would you want | to have that same feeling yourself? | l30n4da5 wrote: | > Even the source of node it's just a bunch of function from | pre-ES4 | | Old code does not mean bad code. Seems like a silly thing to | look at, honestly. | | A bunch of java was written pre-java8, does that make it all | bad? No, no it doesnt. | spoils19 wrote: | In most scenarios, new ways of writing the same code is a | waste of time. I actively discourage use of things like type | inference in newer Java versions as it goes against the | purity of the original vision of the language. It's a | detriment to mental agility, and it also makes scores of | incredibly useful, deep books and learning resources outdated | and useless. | jonny_eh wrote: | New language features are for new code. | rlt wrote: | > At least I'm happy for him he could finally cash out on | sequoia money and become a SV millionaire like everyone else ! | | Tell me you don't know how venture capital works without | telling me you don't know. | jxf wrote: | > Funny because I don't see how they can make any money from | this.... | | Deno Deploy makes money; it's $10/mo/app: | https://deno.com/deploy/pricing | gumby wrote: | > At least I'm happy for him he could finally cash out on | sequoia money and become a SV millionaire like everyone else ! | | It doesn't actually work that way. This is an A round, so a | priced round, so in theory the founders' equity could have some | noticeable valuation but in reality the common will have no | meaningful cash value and the founders aren't worth anything as | a result of this funding. Yet, at least. | nxmnxm99 wrote: | They raised 21 million how are they millionaires lol | gumby wrote: | > When I look at the ecosystem of JavaScript it's frightening | to see how little coders care compared to Go or Kotlin ... | | I don't know about _care_ but there is a clear difference | between people with a computer science or formal programming | background and most developers. You can bemoan that, but isn 't | it desirable that there be a democratization of development? In | fact the number of simplifying tools and packages built by | programmers to speed _everyone_ up inevitably decreases | barriers to doing development, and in many cases improves the | quality by managing the harder stuff properly. | | We had the same phenomenon a generation or more ago with | Visicalc and Excel, where people who would never think of | themselves as programmers wrote complex macros to get their | jobs done. | | And a decade before that we famously had secretaries writing | EMACS macros who certainly never thought of themselves as | programmers. | | I think this is all a good thing, even if I am dubious about my | bank's phone app. | threatofrain wrote: | Personally I got the sense that the Go community doesn't really | care for web apps or anything too close to React, but maybe I'm | just not experienced enough yet with Go. Is there something | like CreateRustApp but with Go? | | https://github.com/Wulf/create-rust-app | geodel wrote: | I think you are right. Go devs seem content with their mark | position/ranking. Use Rust if it is providing more resources | that are helpful to you. | mmgutz wrote: | I don't think it's needed. The new front-end build tools | optimize for production use and have a great developer | experience. Use Next.js or any of the many toolkits out | there. There will be a lot more support for them too. | | I use Go with Next.js and svelte-kit. | brundolf wrote: | My experience with Deno has been: | | - I don't need to mess with third-party tooling, half a dozen | project configs, etc because everything is built-in and Just | Works | | - The standard APIs are mostly wonderful- modern, promise- | based, practical, etc. Documentation leaves something to be | desired and many core APIs are still unstable (in that they get | breaking changes (though you can easily pin to a specific | version)), though for most of the ones with direct analogs in | Node you can honestly just follow the Node docs | | - Standardized importing is awesome; we may finally leave | behind the nightmare of multiple coexisting module systems | | - Standardized testing is awesome | | - The lack of an install step is awesome | | "Isaac Ryan has so far solved none of the problems that exist | in the node ecosystem" is simply wrong, and feels like a cheap | and uninformed dig rooted in some personal beef you must have. | password4321 wrote: | + People get paid, hopefully a few even get big $. | | - Investors want unicorn returns. | | Good luck! | [deleted] | brundolf wrote: | What is their actual business model? I know there's Deno | Deploy, and presumably they offer some kind of enterprise- | support type deal. But the first is easily copied by | competitors (in an already-crowded market), and the other isn't | super lucrative. Is there anything else? | | I love Deno and want it to succeed, but it doesn't feel like a | unicorn, and I'm worried about it being expected to become one | [deleted] | Vinnl wrote: | Considering that one of those competitors is Netlify, then | either the incumbent (i.e. Netlify) is in a great position to | benefit from a succeeding Deno, or Deno Deploy does succeed | and Netlify can profit from that. A bunch of other | participants (GitHub/Nat Friedman, Automattic) seem like they | could benefit from a thriving ecosystem around Deno as well, | even if Deno Deploy isn't particularly successful. | danenania wrote: | Open source ecosystems that become big enough often end up | either producing unicorns, or failing that, producing | unicorn-level returns for existing companies. | | There's no guarantee that the creator of the ecosystem will | be one of the unicorns, but they're as good a bet as any | other company to pull it off. VCs aren't looking for 100% | certainty, just a plausible path. | kjksf wrote: | https://deno.com/deploy/pricing is their business model. | | They charge you for CPU and bandwidth more than they pay for | it. | brundolf wrote: | Right, my point is that any number of cloud providers could | swoop in and offer the same product for probably cheaper | amsnl wrote: | This is generally true about every company though. | Someone can always swoop in, and huge incumbents can | always do it cheaper, at least in theory. | IshKebab wrote: | I feel like they have a better business plan than NPM did at | least. They'll probably get acquired by one of the big cloud | players. | brundolf wrote: | I guess that makes some sense. Still feels like it would be | a weird thing to aim for, but maybe that's the state of the | industry | TAForObvReasons wrote: | Pecunia non olet. If the goal is to make money, an exit | via acquisition is one potential way to make money | bowsamic wrote: | I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of | hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan | himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like | a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC | nikanj wrote: | You don't get $21M from investors for nothing. They will | force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or | kill the company trying | bowsamic wrote: | > You don't get $21M from investors for nothing. | | Do you think that investors see every company that isn't a | unicorn as "nothing"? I think you're living in a fairytale | nikanj wrote: | The VC model is not built on 10x exits. Later rounds, | sure, but series A is definitely looking for larger | multiplier. | crsv wrote: | If you're a venture capitalist, this is in fact the | model. | bowsamic wrote: | If they're expecting a unicorn why are they funding Deno? | lmeyerov wrote: | VCs see a tiny chance that it can be a 100X return. So | raising $20M at say a $50-100M valuation now, that means | betting on a $5B+ exit. In return for getting money to | take a shot at that level of artificially-fueled revenue | growth, the founders are willing to cede control of the | community to professional financiers. As others wrote, | that's the VC model: make a ton of these bets, and as | long as 2-4 turn out, the lottery winners pay for the | bankruptcies. | | Given every big company uses JS, and thus many SaaS VCs | have JS in their annual set of thesis bets, it's | reasonable that Deno got picked by a top group given | their team & growth. Same story with npm, netlify, etc. | | I wish the team luck in hitting significant revenue in | the next 9-12mo, as that will determine a lot of what | happens to the community. A lot of pressure & culture | change to work through! | bowsamic wrote: | Maybe they see a chance of it but they cannot seriously | expect it | | EDIT: the comment I responded to was completely rewritten | and replaced with a different one. Please don't do this | lmeyerov wrote: | The main _base_ expectations are that out of all of | Sequoias bets, some will become $5B+ co 's, and for the | next 18mo, deno can grow headcount with salaries | unrelated to sustainability | | Some people involved might expect more, and I'm sure hope | for more, but I'm a language designer & CEO, not a mind | reader :) | mrkurt wrote: | They do, but that's not a bad thing. Sequoia invests in | companies they think could be worth multiple billions. | | If Deno reaches 30% of the impact of Node, their company | could be worth billions. | | In the meantime, we get a better open source runtime | because they have money to build it out. | ushakov wrote: | a startup could be worth billions only based on the fact | that investors continue throwing money at it | | there are lots of companies, which are technically | "unicorns", but haven't even got any revenue yet (Rivian | and Nikola come to mind) | loftsy wrote: | An "isolate cloud" is exactly how Google App Engine worked 10 | years ago. It was a good idea then and is still a good idea now. | jaredcwhite wrote: | The rise of JavaScript-only clouds intended as "defacto" | solutions for web development scares the hell out of me. | Monocultures are dangerous. At least in the early Node era, it | sat alongside all the other flavors of server infra out there | with a near-infinite variety of languages, platforms, OSes. Now | we're being told that the future of web development is...Deno? | That's it? One tool? One language? One platform? | | Not the web I intend to build and participate in, I can tell you | that right now. | madeofpalk wrote: | Granted, I don't pay a lot of attention to it, but I thought | Docker(files) ended up being the defacto standard, not | Javascript? | | I'm sure _Deno_ will tell you the future is _Deno_. You don 't | have to believe them. | pharmakom wrote: | Deno sounds like a powerful runtime, but what is there to sell? | | I won't build on anything that isn't permissively licensed. They | can't charge for anything without license protection. | erk__ wrote: | They are selling a global Deno hosting service | https://deno.com/deploy | pharmakom wrote: | And what happens when AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital | Ocean, OpenShift, IBM, ... roll this out? | gtirloni wrote: | Is it Docker Inc all over again? | 0des wrote: | joyent | pcj-github wrote: | Comments are a bit negative. I for one think they are onto | something here. Surprised it's only 21M. I would have expected in | these market conditions to beef up more for the next 2-3 years. | vincentmarle wrote: | > Surprised it's only 21M. | | Indeed, especially when you compare with a company such as | Supabase (which is working on way less interesting technology | imho) who just raised $80M: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31328783 | mrkurt wrote: | Deno probably would have raised $80M if they'd raised the | same time Supabase did. Investors got quite a bit more tight | fisted between January and April. | vcryan wrote: | Deno overstates the problem it is intended to solve because its | founders needed to justify achieving funding by being developer- | famous. | | Let's say a company were to adopt this tech over Node, well, it | seems like it would be slightly better, but probably not much of | a game-changer. | | I'll leave it to y'all to talk about what tech is truly | interesting as I don't want to seem ideological/biased, I just | don't see how Deno is particularly notable. | Androider wrote: | It's usually not enough to be a bit better than what you're | trying to displace, you have to be 10X better than the status | quo to have any real impact. For example, SVN tried to be a | better CVS, while Git came out of left field and destroyed the | competition by being 10X better. | | In that, Deno reminds me of the once-hyped Meteor.js. Meteor.js | also though that funding could be answer, but it wasn't. | They're both clever, great for demos, but not sufficiently so | to overcome the sheer inertia of Node+NPM et al. When something | truly 10X better arrives, it will be quite apparent. Just like | how React spawned a new generation of frameworks, nothing has | unseated it yet because all the competition is React-like and | not 10X better. | blobbers wrote: | It will be interesting to see if Deno can provide the level of | productivity improvement node.js delivered (was supposed to | deliver? continues to deliver?). | | It's one thing for it to claim supremacy over node, but can it | attract the TJ Holowaychuk's of the world and truly generate a | full ecosystem. | azangru wrote: | > but can it attract the TJ Holowaychuk's of the world and | truly generate a full ecosystem | | Something like this? | https://twitter.com/dassurma/status/1407048553768402949 | dirtyaura wrote: | Can someone more knowledgeable highlight what kind of security | model do these Deno deployments have compared to virtual machines | and containers, if they are isolated at the process level. | blocked_again wrote: | Is Deno going to be the first runtime environment to IPO? | vaishnavsm wrote: | I think Sun Microsystems IPOd | andruby wrote: | Were they not making & selling hardware at the time of IPO? | didip wrote: | heh, I knew for sure Deno would be successful from the first | moment it appeared on HN and people here were critical of it. | | My rule of: The more HN criticizes it, the more likely it | succeeded, still rings true. | eyberg wrote: | I don't know if marketing was involved with using the term | 'isolate' or not but if they are isolates as described by | companies such as Cloudflare and Google, it might help to speak a | bit more about the actual implementation at the infrastructure | level. | | Isolates are a really interesting approach to deal with the | inherent nature of scripting languages to deal with the lack of | threads as most scripting languages are inherently single- | thread/single-process. If you have a 2000 line ruby class named | 'Dog' you can easily overwrite it with the number 42. This is | awesome on one hand, however it makes scaling the vm through the | use of threads too difficult as threads will share the heap and | then you have to put mutexes on everything removing any | performance gain you would have normally gotten. Instead the end- | user has to pre-fork a ton of app vms with their own large memory | consumption, their own network connections, etc and stick it | behind a load balancer which is not ideal to their compiled, | statically typed cousins and frankly I just don't see the future | allowing these languages as we continuously march towards larger | and large core count systems. I'd personally like to see more of | the scripting languages adopt this construct as it addresses a | really hard problem these types of languages have to deal with | and makes scaling them a lot easier. To this note - if you are | working on this in any of the scripting languages please let me | know because it's something I'd like to help push forward. | | Having said that, they should never be considered as a multi- | tenant (N customers) isolation 'security' barrier. They are there | for scaling _not_ security. | kentonv wrote: | > Having said that, they should never be considered as a multi- | tenant (N customers) isolation 'security' barrier. They are | there for scaling not security. | | V8 isolates are absolutely designed for security. For 10 years | V8 was the only security barrier between sites in Chrome. Now | they have retrofitted strict site isolation for defense-in- | depth, but that doesn't mean the V8 team suddenly doesn't care | about security. Chrome wants both layers to be secure and will | pay a bug bounty if you break either one. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-21 23:00 UTC)