Deno, the new paradigm in writing full stack applications with Javascript

Deno is a new language paradigm. It’s a frontier where intelligent design decisions intersect with the bleeding edge of technology, and backed by a great community of open source contributors.

I’ve had the fortune of spending time with some of the contributors that helped guide my learning that I would like to share with you here.

Building Deno

It’s not just about cargo build, be sure to run tools/setup.py, update submodules, and run tools/build.py — these are explained much more well in the references below.

Flatbuffers in Deno

The primary benefit of Deno is although V8 exists in the runtime it’s abstracted away from end-users. Whereas Node was weighed down by having to directly interact with V8, Deno placed substantial consideration and effort to avoid having developers and contributors rely on interacting with V8, which benefits in a variety of ways:

• no longer having to deal with the subtle mishandlings that developers fear when it comes to using C++ 
• no longer having to know and interact with the inner workings of a very large code base that exists in V8
• leveraging the power of Rust’s benefits for resource management, concurrency, and parallelism

There’s also the issue of implementing best practices, and Flatbuffers enters the space here. Similar to Protobuf in that message parsing can be serialized and deserialized across a variety of languages, Flatbuffers can consume much less memory than Protocol Buffers, and work much more fast and smart.

This is only a sampling of what makes Deno exciting, and I haven’t even scratched the surface yet.

Check out the Flatbuffer declarations in src/msg.fbs

Essentially, the Typescript frontend will serialize messages to a Rust backend that’s managed by the Tokio framework (https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio). The Rust backend deserializes the message, performs the task, serializes the response, and sends it back to the Typescript.

Navigating Deno

Open src/main.rs and proceed to navigate from there. One point to note is that the standard library exists as a submodule that can be found in the denoland at Github (https://github.com/denoland/).

I hope you check it out for yourself. Deno’s looking forward to a bright future, and it’s just getting started!

Resources:

Denolib Guide, a guide to Deno Core: https://github.com/denolib/guide

Awesome Deno, list of things related to Deno: https://github.com/denolib/awesome-deno

Guide to V8 for base familiarity: https://denolib.github.io/v8-docs/