I’ve been developing with Node.js for a while now and I have been enjoying it quite a bit, despite some of its flaws. Overall its been a great experience and I am a big node.js fan.
Much to my surprise however a new project called Deno has emerged. After taking a look at it I realized it is essentially a spiritual successor to node.js but it’s also better than node in pretty much every single way… Well, every way except for its ubiquity! There are tons of high quality open source modules for node which just don’t quite work with Deno out of the box. Deno took a hard line stance on its adoption of ESM modules, which is actually better than common.js, and enables a variety of other features such as not needing npm at all anymore… Its just that ESM is not very wide spread and is only backwards compatible with commonjs modules with some hacks that only work about 75% of the time it seems.
Deno also has a few areas which are still underdevelopment related to certs, TLS and websockets. But fortunately the project has a very active and responsive team of developers! I noticed an issue I was having related to connecting to an internal site due to my CA certificates not being loaded and took the time to debug it. Eventually I figured out that the propery CA cert was stored in my systems keystore and Deno couldn’t find it there. So I managed to find a simple rust crate which supported loading certificates right out of the keystores for each major platform and figured out it was pretty trivial to integrate it in with the crates Deno was already using to do TLS! The Deno developers worked with me to craft the proper changes and do some necessary refactoring and testing, and now I am a Deno contributor.
Here’s my commit:
https://github.com/denoland/deno/commit/02c74fb70970fcadb7d1e6dab857eeb2cea20e09
More
https://github.com/denoland/deno_std/commit/396445052d25b206e0adb00826c7365783fa578a
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