alt Hacker NewsTo be honest, Deno was cool in the past (I even somewhat promoted it on HN in some comments), but nowadays I'm disappointed in their lackluster approach to stability and testing (specifically in Node compat). I recently hit multiple Node compatibility regressions in Deno that were hard to debug, and it doesn't help that they use Claude for everything now, from actual fixes to writing blog posts (even this one).
For example, those two issues recently directly affected my projects:
- https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/34297
- https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/35289
Seems like the core of these issues was a Claude-coauthored PR: https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/33208
I think I'll probably just go back to normal Node because it's stable and won't break things like this between minor releases, plus it's not full-on vibe-developed like Deno and Bun.
P.S.: Deno does genuinely have good parts: built-in type checking, LSP server, formatter with sane defaults, and so on. I'm just very disappointed that they seem to be focusing less on the actual core runtime.
Replies
Well if Node compatibility is your big deal then yeah, why not just use it?
I started a new project on Deno to avoid the NPM mess. Node compatibility was a distraction for the product.
I'm tired of everything depending on Node. Assuming that everybody uses it is lazy.
Time for someone to spin up Endo, but this time no cute ideas for real.
node randomly broke production for us last week https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/63989 not sure it can be considered "stable and won't break things like this between minor releases"
Deno went downhill as soon as they introduced Node compatibility. It promised a better way of doing things, then stooped back down to Node fuckery.
> Seems like the core of these issues was a Claude-coauthored PR: https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/33208
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the linked PR. Using AI here is not really at fault here - it was just a giant rewrite that replaced how we do `node:http` in Deno. Replacing the engine while driving is never easy and we did the best we could. While we have a lot of test coverage and we use tests directly from Node.js codebase, we just don't catch everything. We're constantly working on improving the situation and I'm sorry you hit a problem. I can assure you that we are fixing all Node compat bugs as quickly as possible.