Disillusioned with Deno

• modglot

  2 0 2.7 Shell

  UMD-ESM polyglot

I started a small hobby project. First with TypeScript and Modern Web Dev Server (https://modern-web.dev/guides/dev-server/getting-started/). I don't want bundling and for a while life was good. But then I had some npm packages that didn't support EcmaScript modules. I found a workaround but suddenly I lost motivation. I then thought, okay, perhaps time to change to Deno.

Half a year later I changed to vanilla Rust, trunk, Webassembly and some JavaScript glue code and suddenly a lot of things got easier. Of course as a Rust programmer it is easy for me. But I am also a JavaScript programmer.

This is just anecdotal but it really seems to me that the JavaScript ecosystem is so deeply flawed to burn out people. Let me list two main points which are broken:

- Types are wonky. TypeScript does a huge work to "fix" JavaScript and I love TypeScript. But TypeScript cannot fix the soundness holes in JavaScript. There will be always things that don't work out of the box.

- The missing dependency story. Node introduced CommonJS, but it didn't work on browsers. Browser just added objects to the browser's Window object. Later there are EcmaScript modules but too late. I wrote a hacky polyglot which does both UMD and EcmaScript modules, but I feel the polyglot to be brittle. https://github.com/nalply/modglot

I am still thinking about it, but I feel JavaScript could go the way of PHP. Still important, but too much a mess to be taken seriously. Perhaps in about ten years. I don't know.

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