deno VS esbuild

NodeJS is the dominant Javascript server runtime environment for Javascript and Typescript (sort of) projects. But over the years, we have seen several attempts to build alternative runtime environments such as Deno and Bun, today’s subject, among others.

https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues is the ideal place -- we try to triage all incoming issues, the more specific the repro the easier it is to address but we will take a look at everything that comes in.

Install Node.js (or Bun, or Deno, or whatever JS runtime you prefer) if it's not there

QUIC is very exciting, after seeing what it can do for performance in Cloudflare network and Cloudflare workers, I can't wait to finally see it in Deno[0] 1.41.

[0] https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/21942#issuecomment-192...

So as an end user it's kind of like https://deno.com/ where you buy into a runtime + comes prepacked with DBs (k/v stores), scheduling, and deploy stuff?

> by storing Unison code in a database, keyed by the hash of that code, we gain a perfect incremental compilation cache which is shared among all developers of a project. This is an absolutely WILD feature, but it's fantastic and hard to go back once you've experienced it. I am basically never waiting around for my code to compile - once code has been parsed and typechecked once, by anyone, it's not touched again until it's changed.

Interesting. Whats it like upgrading and managing dependencies in that code? I'd assume it gets more complex when it's not just the Union system but 3rd party plugins (stuff interacting with the OS or other libs).

~90MB+ at this stage and do now allow compression without erroring out. Deploying ala Golang is not feasible at that level but could well be down the line if this dev branch is picked up again!

The exe output grew from from ~50MB to plus ~90MB from 2021 to 2024: https://github.com/denoland/deno/discussions/9811 which mean Deno is worse than Node.js's pkg solution by a decent margin.

Behind the scenes is a simple Sveltekit-powered server function to fetch a Spotify client token then find a user's recommendation playlist and its track information. A Deno edge function to performs this data fetch and renders server-side Svelte.

If your application is written in JavaScript, integrating it with JavaScript extensions is a no-brainer. However, Secutils.dev is entirely written in Rust. How would I even begin? Fortunately, I recently came across an excellent blog post series explaining how to implement your JavaScript runtime in a Rust application with Deno:

At first we wanted to just get rid of all the helper utilities. Keep only the kernel, but this would mean a loss of backward compatibility. We needed some efficient code processing instead with recomposition and tree-shaking. We needed a bundler. But which one? Our testing approach relies on targets, not sources. We rebuilt the project frequently, speed was critical requirement. In essence, we chose a solution from a couple of among all available alternatives: esbuild and parcel. Esbuild won. Specifically in our case, it proved to be more productive and customizable.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.