Deno Overtakes Bun in the Race to Be a Drop-in Node.js Replacement 🦕

Remember Deno? It’s another “Node.js killer,” but with its own strange worldview. Well, version 2.8 came out recently, gave Node API compatibility a major boost, and overtook Bun on that front.

If their benchmarks are to be believed, they’ve made some serious speed improvements, but the most interesting stuff is under the hood.

The highlights: first, goodbye to that silly npm: prefix. The deno add and deno install commands now look for everything in npm by default. Second, they finally finished the node:crypto cryptography support that used to break half the libraries out there. Third, they’ve added deno why for digging through the dependency tree and a built-in deno audit fix that automatically patches vulnerable packages. They also added lazy loading of ESM modules, support for .npmrc configs, the deno clean and deno remove subcommands, faster TLS connections, deno transpile for stripping types, and a bunch of new Node.js APIs.

In short, if you want to dig into every detail, head over to their official blog.

Looks like they realized that taking on the entire npm ecosystem head-on was suicide and decided to quietly absorb it instead.

Tell me how you feel about Deno. Have you used it? Do you like it? Or do you still not understand why it exists when we’ve got good old Node? 👇