Deno 1.0 is launched on 13th May 2020 by Ryan Dahl — the original creator of Node.js It’s been around 2 years now, we are hearing the term “Deno” and developer community especially is quite excited since it is coming from the author of - Ryan Dahl. In this post, we will discuss a brief history of Deno and Node along with their salient features and popularity. JavaScript one Node.js Deno was announced on by in his talk “ ”. In his talk, Ryan mentioned his regrets about the initial design decisions with Node.js. JSConf EU 2018 Ryan Dahl 10 Things I Regret About Node.js In his JSConf presentation, he explained the regrets while developing Node.js like Not sticking with Promises, Security, The Build System (GYP), package.json and node_modules, etc. But in the same presentation after explaining all the regret, he launched his new work named .🦕 It was in the process of development then. Deno But on , around 2 years later yesterday, launched by Ryan and the team (Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder, and Bartek Iwańczuk). So let’s talk about some features of Deno. 13th May 2020 Deno 1.0 First, let’s try to find out what the heck is Deno? Deno is a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime with secure defaults and great developer experience. Deno is built on 3 pillars - — JavaScript Runtime Engine Chrome V8 Programming language Rust A runtime for writing reliable, asynchronous, and slim applications. Tokio — Deno aims to be a productive and scripting environment for the modern programmer. Similar to Node.js, Deno emphasize on , providing a set of non-blocking core IO utilities, along with their blocking versions. event-driven architecture Installation Steps: Deno ships as a single executable with no dependencies. You can install it using the installers below- Using Shell: curl -fsSL http //deno.land/ /install/install. | s: x sh sh Or using Homebrew: deno brew install See for more installation options. deno_install A basic in Deno looks like the following (same as in Node.js): Hello-World program console. ( ); log "Hello world" We will try to compare the features of Deno with Node throughout the post. And in the end, will try to find out is it really a threat or not? There is no doubt that Node.Js is a huge success JavaScript runtime environment. Today, more than thousands of production build is using Node.js. Another reason for this success is a package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js which has millions of reusable libraries and packages for every JavaScript developer out there. NPM - Node is a decade old now since it was initially launched on . On the other hand, Deno is relatively very new. Still, not used in the production build much. It could be used to create web servers like Node.js, perform scientific computations, etc. May 27, 2009 Highlighted features of Deno 🎆 Secure - No file, network, or environment access by default. 👁🗨 Ships only a single executable file.1⃣ Say No to node_modules and package.json.❌ TypeScript support out of the box. 🤝 1. Security The program in Deno is executed in a secure sandbox (by default). Scripts cannot access the hard drive, open network connections, or make any other potentially malicious actions without permission. (E.g) The following runs a basic Deno script without any read/write/network permissions: deno run index.ts Explicit flags are required to expose corresponding permission: deno --allow- --allow- index.ts run read net 2. Single executable file Deno attempts to provide a standalone tool for quickly scripting complex functionality. Deno is a single file that can define arbitrarily complex behavior without any other tooling. So, every library will be explicitly called and included in the program. 3. Module system Here, we do not have any package.json or node_modules. Source files can be imported using a relative path, an absolute path or a fully qualified URL of a source file as shown below: { serve } ; ( req serve({ : })) { req.respond({ : }); } import from "https://deno.land/std@0.50.0/http/server.ts" for await const of port 8000 body "Hello from Deno\n" 4. Typescript Support TypeScript is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. TypeScript is at the end transcompiles to JavaScript only. It is another popular language of recent times used heavily in Angular Framework and React.js UI library. Deno supports TypeScript without additional tooling. Deno is a new runtime for executing JavaScript and TypeScript outside of the web browser like Node.js But it’s important to understand that Deno is not an extension of Node — it’s completely a newly written implementation. a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. Deno - Slowly, Deno is also getting popular like Node.js. You can see the popularity by Deno’s official twitter handle with and 50k+ stars on Github . @deno_land Followers 11.5K https://github.com/denoland/deno Deno on GitHub Limitations of Deno 😞 Deno is not compatible with Node (NPM) packages. Huge disappointment for the big JavaScript dev community. Since it uses Typescript compiler internally to parse the code to plain JavaScript, it is still very slow comparatively. It lags in HTTP server performance. In the end, we can conclude that Node and Deno are two different JavaScript runtime environments altogether. So it’s better not to compare both. The choice depends on the given requirements. After looking at the gradually increasing popularity of Node among the developers for a decade, now it will be difficult for Deno to cover that in less time. But indeed for new features, one can definitely try Deno. We will keep an eye on further development of Deno and figure out more in the coming years. So, today we can make a statement that - As in 2020, Deno is not at all a threat to Node. Write your suggestions and feedbacks in the comment section below, share it with your friends and colleagues.