Ryan Dahl
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I mean, GitHub top languages on GitHub as of the 2023 survey, which, um, I'm familiar with, I tweeted something about it is JavaScript. Number one, TypeScript is number three and Python's number two. So it's like, yeah, no, it's massive is, is absolutely like, and, and, you know, just, just as a programmer, you know, like if you're going to give, it is the default programming language, right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Is, is kind of the shared, the shared knowledge that all programmers have.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I mean, it's worth pointing out, first of all, that Deno is MIT licensed. So it is essentially public domain software. It's completely free, right? It's not a commercial product. Our commercial product is in kind of cloud hosting services. But yeah, when I was working on Node, there was a time where it was very clear that Node was taking off and I could not hire any people to work on this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And that was a ridiculous situation because, yeah, The company I worked for saw this as some sort of marketing effort when in fact, like this was the most important thing that that company was undertaking or, you know, back in 2010, we didn't have the same kind of funding situation that we do in these days. And, you know, building software like Node or Deno is a expensive undertaking, right?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Software engineers are expensive. It requires a lot of time and energy to work on stuff. And it's good to have clear direction and not just a herding cats. Right. You have you move very slowly when when like you rely on external contributions and it goes in different directions and Yeah, I have certain software that I want to build and I want to push it in a certain direction.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And this is software for the masses, too, that is not so far away from all sorts of business concerns. So I think it's totally reasonable to have a company around this. And I think it's kind of the right incentive structure as well for building open source software. you know, there's this two sides of the same coin.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Like there's open source developers out there that will complain about, you know, how they have to work for free and they have to deal with issues and random people like writing in. And then there's other people out there complaining about VC funded open source projects that like, you know, Oh God, like what, what, what's kind of the motivation behind this?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Are they going to, you know, do something sneaky here? I, you know, I think, These are the same problem. Like we need to get paid to write software. We're writing, we're building open source public domain software. MIT license is very, very free, right? Like people can fork it, they can sell it, they can do anything with it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I think the important thing is to be honest and not change licenses out from under people. I think that is unacceptable. But beyond that, being able to build some software, release it for free, and then use that software in other situations for commercial purposes perfectly aligns the incentives. And I am fortunate enough to be in a position where we were able to raise money to work on this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Well, it is MIT licensed. So you can go start a company and you can fork Deno and then you can release it under, you know, you can hire a bunch of engineers and work on it for two years and then license those changes under something else, right? And it's, you know, it could be that, you know, Deno goes in a different direction and the, you know, Deno 4 or whatever gets re-licensed
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
What we've built so far is MIT licensed and will be that way. And no, there's no legal system in which this is dictated other than my own integrity, right? And saying that this is what... that what we're doing as a company.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Well, I think it comes down to the business model. So you get into trouble with open core business models because you have to decide, are these features commercial features or are these free features? And that kind of aligns the incentives in a way.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
poor way where you're, you're basically, you know, stealing from the open source users to, to, uh, not stealing, of course, these people are developing it, but you know, the, the incentives are just kind of the, the commercial is pitted against the open source. And what I'm trying to do, I have long recognized this, you know, I want my business model to be orthogonal to the open source project.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
So it helps it, you know, we're developing a JavaScript infrastructure that can be used in many places. We don't sell a, you know, enterprise version of Deno with like special enterprise features. We sell hosting services, right? We sell things that are orthogonal to Deno itself.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
We're all we're all figuring it out. But, you know, I think it's it's really misplaced to, you know, look at somebody who is or anybody who is like putting out public free public domain stuff and say you are doing something wrong, like I mean, that's somebody else's time and energy that's being put into essentially free software, right? That's, you know, whatever happens with it in the future.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I mean, you know, at least that software is free and benefits humanity in some way. But, yeah, you know, I think a lot about this stuff and I really want to set up Dino as a company to not be in a position where it needs to be relicensed in the event that like I am somehow not part of the company. That's an inconceivable proposition right now. But, you know, who knows?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah. So, uh, Deno does follow Sember, and there are breaking changes in this, but Deno 2 is really trying to, I guess I'm calling it marketing in some sense, just trying to give some weight to the changes that are coming in Deno. So a lot of it's backwards compatible. There are some minor breaking changes, but those are essentially just small API things that aren't super important.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
The big changes are the module system. The fact that the MPM, the ability to pull in MPM modules is like really good now. The fact that we support package JSON projects. So if you have like a package JSON with some scripts in it and some dependencies, like you can actually run those right out, right in Deno. And the introduction of JSR, which is kind of this newfangled competitor to MPM.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
No, not a competitor in a way. It's a superset to MPM. It's a new package registry where you can share JavaScript and TypeScript code. And yeah, we are introducing some stability guarantees. Probably most people listening here don't care about that. But yeah, we're starting an LTS, a long-term support release, giving some better stability guarantees on not changing APIs in the future.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Not that we were changing them very often, but... you know, having a branch that we backport security fixes to. So, yeah, this all kind of comes together. And, yeah, we want to let people know that, like, things are pretty different than, you know, the Deno one days where you can only import HEP specifiers, which, by the way, you can still do in Deno.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
But it's not necessarily the recommended path for distributing code. we recommend you publish to NPM, pull in packages there, or publish to JSR, which is the delightful alternative to that if you can't figure out how to compile your TypeScript to JavaScript and whether you should support ESM or CommonJS or some other thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And if you want to be supporting multiple runtimes, because JSR is not just for Node, it is for Deno, Node, bun, CloudFlare workers, et cetera, browsers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Uh, I mean, we just pay for it right now that the Dino company it's designed to be simply hosted. Uh, it's, it's designed to be cost effective. It's designed to be very cashable and, and simple, you know, JSR is not, is not a commercial project. It is also MIT licensed. It, I have no intention of, of ever turning this into a business.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
We, you know, the Dino company is, is running this right now, but, um, I'm, I'm hoping to get this into a foundation and, uh, generally having this be a public service for JavaScript because NPM is just not evolving ever. It's just not changing post GitHub acquisition. And this is just really strange for the world's most popular programming language.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Are we really just going to stand by and let this be a static future forever? How difficult is it to publish a JavaScript package these days? You have to have a lot of knowledge. That's in a language where things are just supposed to be trivially easy. If I want something that's really hard, let me go to the Rust ecosystem and at least I'll get a lot of speed out of it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
JavaScript should be simple. This is a scripting language. It's for the children. It should just be super easy to do stuff. Because of this module, because of the CommonJS ESM,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
situation, because NPM is not changing, because Node changes very, very slowly, and us old-timers in the JavaScript world maybe look past this because we're so familiar with all of the troubles that we don't even see them as troubles anymore. You realize that actually writing a library in TypeScript and figuring out how to post it to NPM in a way that...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Lots of people can consume it is not actually super trivial, like definitely does not tell you how to do that on the NPM website. And yeah, in JSR, this is super trivial. You just write your TypeScript, you post it directly, and suddenly you can use it in Node. You can use it anywhere. Like it is delightfully trivial.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
So there are quite a few people posting them to both just because JSR is new and people are kind of uncertain about it. But I think that will dissipate with time. JSR actually has an NPM registry built into it. So npm.jsr.io is the NPM registry. And when you publish there, it builds an NPM package and speaks the NPM protocol.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And so you can actually import JSR NPM packages like in the NPM format directly in Node, for example, just by setting some stuff in your NPM RC file. So there is a little bit of like a one line sort of setup to be able to pull in JSR packages that in, in a node project directly from, from JSR. But, uh, yeah, nevertheless, people, people are also often posting things to, to NPM.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And it's, it's a feature that we're kind of dwelling on right now about whether we should support it. It'd be pretty easy to, to like allow people to post to JSR and then auto post to NPM just to, just to kind of have, uh,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
uh in npm first uh experience um you know if that helps people i think that's that might be worthwhile doing but yeah generally you know the the the broad strokes of of everything i'm undertaking here is like let's level up javascript let's just make this nicer let's strive to make this nicer and uh yeah if you use if you use jsr either as a consumer or a publisher
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
you will be delighted, like, you know, auto-generated documentation. Like, why does JavaScript not have auto-generated documentation? Like, you know, with everybody writing stuff in TypeScript these days, like, we have all the information available, and yet, you know, somehow NPM does not have this feature. Like, we need to make some progress here, and clearly Microsoft is not doing that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Microsoft slash GitHub, I should say.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I mean, auto-generated docs, for example, is, is something that's, that's going to help you. We have something called the JSR score, which is stolen from, from Dart actually, where we kind of rank packages. We give you a better score if you follow best practices. So
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
you know, we don't force you to, to do all this rigmarole upfront because, you know, sometimes you just want to publish something and don't, don't want to do too much, but, uh, you, you kind of get this signal about like how, what, what sort of best practices are, are people following? Like, are they, are they adding doc strings to all of their exported modules?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Are, are they, do they have a readme? Do they have a license file? This, this sort of thing, you know, it's, it's generally much more searchable. You can search through symbols. You can, uh, It allows you to pull in TypeScript types nicely. If those packages are written in TypeScript, there's not like a definitively typed thing that you also need to know about.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, it's generally a good experience. But yeah, I would say the real 10x behavior is when you publish, then it's like, oh my God, I can't believe it's so simple. Or rather, now I recognize how terrible NPM publishing actually is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
That's right. Yeah, you can mark in your package which runtimes are supported and that displays it on the package page. And so there are modules posted to JSR that have nothing to do with Deno, right? Browser only or for Bun, for example. It is not Deno specific. That's awesome.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I'm going to say yes. It's always a little bit of an open question about whether... A little hesitation, but probably, right? A little hesitation because, gosh, there are a lot of built-in node APIs and they have a lot of funky behavior that is really difficult to... There's an endless list of compatibility bugs and there's always going to be a long tail of compatibility, but...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
AWS, Puppeteer, and Fastify, I think we support all of those. So I think it should work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Uh-oh. Are you going to try it live?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You can do Deno upgrade, and then Deno upgrade RC will get you the release candidate for Deno 2.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Oh, you have homebrew. Yeah. So you'd have to install from our curl script, and then you can do it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
My hands are sweaty, but yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You know, dot com can, uh, grab that curl script, run it. There it is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You might have to add something to your path, but, uh, should, should be, should be okay.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Dino space upgrade space RC. Okay.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I think it might actually switch that out with Deno. Well, that would be... Can you do like PS and see if you have node processes or Deno processes?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
PS tree maybe to kind of see the sub-process of the Deno task process.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
In PS tree? Yes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
No, no, that's a special command. You might have to brew install that. Brew install. Or, I mean, you can just do it in ps, but you might have other node processes running.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You might have to give it a dash A or dash dash allow net or something. Right. Should I allow?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, Dino does implement... a huge number of the node APIs at this point. And yeah, it was a very large lift. And also given from the principles in which Deno started, also kind of a philosophical lift as well. But yeah, we're here. We've convinced ourselves this is what we need to do in order to level up JavaScript. This is how we can make people's lives simpler.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And that this ultimately is kind of a better experience for everybody, even if this means, you know, deep inside of Deno, we do implement common JS somewhere. Like we have to do that in order to interoperate with NPM modules. And, you know, it gets complicated deep inside.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
But hopefully for the user, it's a single executable that just does all of this stuff that hopefully is pretty understandable. It has a Deno LSP that if you open up VS Code, we'll interact with that and give you linting and code formatting and all sorts of type checking, obviously.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Day after day, it continually surprises me. It's just, you know, like every year, like this is how big Node will be, right? And then, you know, the... Next year, it gets bigger and bigger. It's a privilege to have worked on this.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, I mean, I am an idealist and it was hard for me to kind of come to terms with this. But yeah, like I said, I mean, we're building software for people. And if people can't run it, then we're not achieving our goals.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
our goal of of leveling up javascript i think what uh excites me though is that we've actually built this you know in a pretty structured way this is not just a a monolithic app but there's actually multiple layers out so you're using the dino executable that's kind of the highest layer you know what most people will interact with but there's also different rust libraries uh lots of different rust libraries actually that
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
you can kind of plug into different layers depending on which experience you want. So people can actually build custom runtimes pretty easily with Rust, with V8, using the lowest layer would be Rusty V8, which is our basically like zero overhead Rust bindings to V8. And V8's APIs are... wildly complicated. It is not an easy beast to drive. But in Rust, you can do this all in a memory-safe way.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
It's very nice to you. The C++ API, you need to know what you're doing pretty seriously in order to drive it. In Rust, like you can kind of just hammer on the keyboard and write a V8 runtime just because like whatever, when it compiles, it's kind of going to work. Yeah, Rusty V8 is also going 1.0 next week, actually.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And above that is DenoCore, which adds a little bit more infrastructure, adds the module system, adds not the NPM stuff, but adds kind of basic ESM modules. It adds a thing called ops, which is basically our binding layer to Rust, an easy way to make async functions kind of bind into JavaScript, essentially do this in a super optimal way. Above that, we have EXTs, which are different.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Think of them as native modules. So, for example, one extension set of modules is like the Fetch API. And so maybe you just want DenoCore plus the Fetch API and nothing else. And you can build your own runtime using those two things. Obviously, all this stuff is MIT licensed. And so, you know, for different use cases, you know, obviously you need to be programming in Rust.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Like this isn't necessarily approachable to everybody. Sure. But for some systems, like maybe you're building a serverless system where you really only want fetch and you just want some JavaScript execution, well, you can kind of plug into it at this lower layer. Yeah, the high-level Deno executable is opinionated, has a bunch of functionality in it, but we still have these lower layer things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And I think that's kind of the appropriate trade-off, right? Because there's a smaller audience at those lower layers, but they're also more technical. They're also able to kind of deal with this stuff. The highest level people just want to pull in the AWS SDK, and they don't care at all about anything else. They're like, Do you have that? Yes or no? End of story.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And Dino, we just need to pull that in.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I mean, it is still a thing. I think, you know, people might imagine that it's more than it is. I mean, it's really kind of describing in minute detail kind of how, say, fetch works in server environments. Yeah. It's kind of hard to get agreement between all of the server-side vendors on what constitutes servers in JavaScript. That is a goal, but it's probably not something immediate.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
There's not going to be a spec for exactly how an HEP server is going to work in JavaScript. But nevertheless, we participate in it. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, it's been a while. I think we started this in 2017. and just kind of got off to a slow start demo for a conference. But yeah, it's been plugging away at it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah. So just for clarity, like in the Deno open source project, the Deno KB APIs are backed by SQLite and you can kind of run a single instance and kind of have that same functionality. And
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
dino deploy our our commercial platform uh when you when you run you know these edge functions that are running across the world uh the the dino kv apis are backed by foundation db it's like kind of this this big distributed database that's pretty sweet the dino kv apis are not stabilized in dino 2 uh we we they continue to be experimental in part because this is kind of an experimental business effort and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And we're not quite sure if we want to go further down this route. I actually want to decouple the KV APIs from the Deno runtime itself and have them be a module that you pull in. You should be able to pull in JSR at Deno slash KV. There's no real reason that it needs to be built directly into the runtime. That's just for ease of implementation, essentially.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah. And, and it is, it is not safe. Yeah. Just to clarify, it is not stabilized in Dino too. So it's not something that we are necessarily supporting indefinitely. I guess it likely will be moved. But, you know, nevertheless, the DenoKV stuff is pretty awesome to you.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I don't know if you played around with it at all, but like our other stuff, it's just freaking delightful to have like a easy state store. But yeah, there's a lot of questions to think through with that because, yeah, obviously a lot of people need a bit more of a complex database than a KV store. And like real application code actually needs a relational database to
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of ideas around here, probably more inspired by Bun that did that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I think it's a little, yeah, there is a little bit questionable because, I mean, you can always pull this stuff into packages. And there's always the question of, like, where's the runtime concern and what belongs outside of it? And it's always a difficult discussion. It's hard to have kind of an algorithm for deciding that. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You know, if Node does stabilize that API, because Deno does implement the Node built-in APIs, we will implement that. And of course, we have SQLite. We already use SQLite in there. So it'd be a pretty trivial matter to add that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, it's basically feature... Yeah, the release candidate is almost exactly what will be there. Yeah, we released Deno 1 back in 2020. So it's been four years now. We've talked a lot about... We thought about this for a while about what to do for Deno 2 and teased it multiple times, but always kind of pulled back from it because we're like, yeah, actually, no, it's missing this. We're not sure.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
That's what's exciting about JavaScript, right? It's, it's just like, it's it's, it's madness. It's chaos. But, but it's, it's just kind of yeah, there's, there's so many people with different ideas and everybody's inventing new things all the time. I think it's, it's really fun.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
We do. I feel like I shouldn't talk about it at this state. We have like new commercial efforts underway that are under heavy development right now, but it's a little too soon to talk about it publicly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Once 2.0 is stabilized, I think there are a lot of cleanups to do. I think there is still kind of a long list of node compatibility to work on. I think making the LSP faster is something that we'll be looking at. I think we removed Deno Bundle for 2.0. because we didn't have a great bundling story, but that bundling is obviously part of the JavaScript tool chain.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And we think that that's something that Deno ought to provide. It's just, in general, bundling is a pretty hard problem to solve. It's not just simply bundle the script. There's all sorts of things you need to consider, and there's just tooling that is purpose-built for that that is much better, like ESBuild, for example.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
So we are, you know, potentially not not not totally decided yet, but but potentially going to undertake having that in in the actual tool chain and providing like a really good experience there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I review a lot of code. I write code sometimes. I write more example code to point out where our problems are. But yeah, Dino's like a 27-person company. And even at this scale, I'm finding myself becoming more of a manager these days than an actual programmer, which is fine, I guess.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I mean, it's just what problem, at what scale are you solving a problem? Are you working on a much larger problem? Because very often I can just ask some engineer, can you work on this for three days? Uh, if I work on something for three days, that is, is going to block other things that, that I might be working on. And so, yeah, you're just, just working on problems at a larger scale.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
That said, I mean, I, I love programming, obviously it's, it's like deeply satisfying and, and, uh, you know, I just don't understand why people work on crossword puzzles, like work on software. It's, it's, it's the same thing, but much faster, much, much more fun.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Someday, maybe I won't be working on Deno anymore. Deno won't be growing anymore or whatever. Then I look forward to sitting down and coding on some small stuff. But yeah, right now, the scale of Deno is such that it doesn't make too much sense for me to work on coding stuff day in and day out.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Sure. More or less.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I've definitely thought about it because, I mean, I'm not the, you know, I'm like a nerdy engineer. I'm not necessarily the best salesperson. And, you know, doing the CEO job, I think you have to be kind of a salesperson, right? You have to go out and close contracts and that sort of thing. But I, you know... The focus in my life isn't to be the best programmer in the world.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Like we have to... So we've thought long and hard about this release. And yeah, I'm excited to finally get it out there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I'm just trying to build cool stuff. And I think it's interesting to learn new skills. Doing Deno as a company has been pretty eye-opening. Because before that in my career, I was an engineer only. And learning how to raise money, how to manage people, how to do sales, how to do product. All of this stuff has its own interesting bits.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And I think it's about solving the problem at the end of the day. And you do what it takes to solve the problem.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I think the need to focus is the thing that I didn't understand very well going into this. Because when you have a bunch of people working for you and you have
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
a bunch of money to, to be, uh, spent, like you can go in all sorts of directions and like, that's all very conceivable, but I think the, there is, there is a real need to kind of focus all of that effort in one direction, like get on, add up all those factors and, and kind of make progress in one direction. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's a learning experience.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, it's hard to answer in general, but ideally with data, ideally we look at some data and we say, OK, obviously this is the way to go. This method is faster than that method, thus obviously we do this. Or we took a survey and people prefer this to this. But very, very often you don't have clear signals like that or you just have some dirty signals or some intuition. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You talk, talk to the people you trust, you, you take their opinions. Um, I don't, you know, not back in no days, nor currently do I believe that a project should be run as a democracy. You know, I, I'm, I'm just took a poll, uh, today about something. And, uh, uh, you know, I, I, I, I value people's feedback, but, um, you know, people's opinions on stuff, but, uh, ultimately, uh,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
You just got to think about it and weigh in all the evidence that you have and decide what is going to level up JavaScript, what is going to further the company, and try to decide that as best you can.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
It definitely is not a person.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah, this is my idea. I actually wrote a previous open letter to Oracle, I think two years ago, on my personal blog, which obviously did not get a response. You know, when we were talking about, is Java, is Oracle... person or not. It made me think of a quote from Brian Cantrell, my former boss at Joyent, now CTO of Oxide. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
The lawnmower is going to just spin its blade and cut grass. And he was referring to Oracle in that way. Oracle should not be anthropomorphized. Yeah, you know, it might surprise people to know that JavaScript is a trademark. It came through a partnership that Netscape did with Sun back in the day for this newfangled scripting thing in their web browser, and they called it JavaScript.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And the partnership with Sun was somewhat dubious because JavaScript has nothing to do with Java, but they ended up calling it JavaScript and Sun. owned the trademark as a result. And Oracle acquired Sun, I think 2007 or so. And as a result, Oracle owns the JavaScript trademark and they, like dutiful lawyers do, renew it every year.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yet Oracle really has no, you know, they do have a product called JavaScript. You know, they have several products that use JavaScript like everybody does, but they are not a major player in JavaScript development, right? The major players being JavaScript. Google with V8 and Apple with JSC, Mozilla, of course, but nevertheless own this trademark.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Sure. I mean, there are things that I said in that original talk that Deno 2 actually goes back on. So, for example, introducing the process global variable is, I think, one of the things I regretted about Node. Turns out, like, yeah, I think the...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And because of this, the standard for JavaScript, the spec for JavaScript is called ECMAScript. because they have to avoid this name. And there is not actually a JavaScript conference. You cannot have a JavaScript conference because Oracle will sue you. You have to have like JSConf.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And it just kind of generally creates this confusion where like the world's most popular programming language, right? is somehow called a name that nobody can use. And I think it is really not reflective of what trademark... It's not in the spirit of trademark law. Trademark law, I'm perfectly fine. I have trademarked for Deno, but I do not want people to call things Deno.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
But JavaScript is just this... This vestige of this acquisition and this weird partnership back in the day. And Oracle, you know, whoever renews it at Oracle, some lawyer somewhere just does this because that's what they do with all of their trademarks. And what I'm trying to do with this open ladder is create some public pressure, create a public, you know, let people know how...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
this is in the community. And gosh, you know, my letter two years ago just was like, Oracle, you could get some goodwill here by just releasing this trademark into the public domain. Obviously, they have not done that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And recently I've discovered that there's actually a process at the patent office, the USPTO, to challenge trademarks and that the USPTO is actually cracking down on trademark non-use. And there is a legal definition of what it means to abandon a And this letter explains why Oracle exactly meets this, like they have abandoned the JavaScript trademark as defined in the U.S. code.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And so I am gathering support for challenging this trademark officially with the U.S. patent office.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
we're just kind of hitting reality with, with, you know, how, how big the NPM ecosystem is and just realizing that, and this is, this is kind of a big part of, of Dino too, is, is just realizing, you know, if you're going to, if you want to be able to pull in some random NPM library, like GRPC, which you definitely want to be able to do because it's super complicated and like, you're not going to rewrite that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
is willing to contribute some time to help us put together this petition to cancel the JavaScript trademark, that would be very welcome. I think the email is lawyers at javascript.tm. We'll start undertaking this process once I get Deno 2 out. In a couple of weeks or here, we'll try to do this. This is just generally trying to make the world's default programming language better.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
It's not necessarily a product. It's There's nothing for sale here, obviously. It's just trying to rectify the situation. I have no intention of renaming the Deno company to the JavaScript company or anything. I just don't like this weird situation where I can't say that Deno is a JavaScript runtime. That's just silly. That is not what trademarks were intended for.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
you have to be pretty close. You have to basically implement the Node built-in APIs. And although we look at this very carefully and still have a core philosophy of leveling up JavaScript and narrowing the gap between server-side JavaScript and browser JavaScript and looking to the future of JavaScript, Deno is not a re-implementation of Node in Rust. There is a
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
There's work that has been done to be able to import NPM packages and be able to run Node projects out of the box. At this point with Deno 2, it's pretty great. You can basically drop into most Node projects, let's say modern Node projects, if they're using ESM, not if they're using CommonJS, and use Deno with them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
Yeah. Uh, very, very difficult, uh, decision to be made after, after like wringing our hands over, over long periods of time. Yeah. I mean, the original idea with the Deno module system is, uh, let's follow the ESM spec. Exactly. Let's follow exactly what browsers do. And, uh, browsers allow you to have, uh, HGPS imports in there and, uh, local imports.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And can we actually like build an entire module system on top of that? The answer is yes, you can. And it works pretty nice. Like it's pretty great, especially for like single file scripts and kind of small little programs. You can just kind of drop in some imports in there and get off to the races pretty quickly. it gets problematic as you kind of scale up in complexity.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And in particular, when you need to interoperate with different systems, right. When you need to pull in the AWS, uh, SDK, right. Like you're, there's just some things that you are not going to rewrite. And, uh, You know, I think we've found a middle ground here with like NPM specifiers where, you know, we're still staying true to the ESM spec.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
These are still URLs, URIs in that like it's NPM colon express. Yet, you know, in order to pull in NPM packages, it's much more complicated than the HEP specifiers. I mean, the beauty of the original DenoVision was like, oh, this dead simple resolution scheme that like really makes it easy to interoperate with If people implemented this, it makes it very easy to interoperate with stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And yeah, frankly, the reality is like that works to some scale. But, you know, we're interested in making software for lots of people. And, you know, I'm not satisfied working on software. a runtime that 500 people can use for small scripts. I really want to make software for millions of people. And server-side JavaScript is truly millions of people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And in order to allow those people to really level up JavaScript, I'm pretty convinced that you need to be able to pull in NPM modules and understand package JSON and implement the node built-in modules in order to make any progress. Otherwise, you just face this boil-the-ocean problem.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I'm sure that's possible, but I am still pretty adamant that this new base infrastructure that we've built for Deno, the Rust code base that we have, the secure by default capabilities, the native TypeScript support, the fact that we have all these built infrastructure these web standard APIs, the fact that it's all in one tool chain, right? It's literally a single executable that
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
you know, has a LSP, has code formatting, has linting. I'm not willing to sit in committees for, you know, 13 years trying to make all of that stuff happen. You know, I think the failure mode of Deno might be that it ultimately ends up being an R&D effort because, you know, Node these days like looks at what we do and says, oh, okay, actually, that's a good idea. Let's kind of pull it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
pull this in like the native TypeScript support. But I am bullish on what we're doing. I think it is very useful to have dino.exe that you can hand to not just deep JavaScript developers that know what Prettier is and know how to configure, how to get started with the project, but can hand it to some random Java developer or somebody coming from PHP or whatever. Just allow them to get started
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
very easily. And I think this idea of striving for simplicity is Well, let's put it this way. JavaScript, I continue to believe, is not like other programming languages. It is something like the default programming language because so much of human infrastructure is built on the web. And because JavaScript is like HTTP or CSS or HTML, it is one of the protocols of the web.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
It has a future that you can't necessarily say about Swift necessarily. Lots of people use Swift. A lot of infrastructure is built on Swift, but it's not like JavaScript. JavaScript will be here five years from now, if not 10, if not 20, if not... you know, forever. It might, this may be like, like really deeply embedded in human, in humanity at this point.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
And, uh, I think it's, I think it is worth the effort to try to strive and make this simple and, you know, allow server side JavaScript, which obviously is, is useful to have the fetch API to, to use, use the same APIs that are in the browser to use ES modules, right? Like they're, they're,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 (Interview)
I think this is kind of slowly coming around that people are accepting that ES modules is actually the standard. But I mean, gosh, how long is it going to take, right? When you run a file in Node these days, it is still not defaulting to ESM. It's common JS. So...