Exploring the Deno runtime

While Node.js is a tremendous success story, not everyone is a fan. Some critics say that the huge fragmentation combined with the lack of system controls offers too great an attack surface. In the past, we’ve seen countless attacks that have abused the vulnerabilities introduced by exactly this problem.

Another issue is that Node.js did have to invent a lot of APIs – for example, to interact with the filesystem. There was no API available in the browser that looked similar to what was desired. Of course, as we now know, the browser APIs kept improving and even things such as filesystem access are implemented there. However, the APIs never aligned, mostly because the variants for Node.js are neither controllable nor fully asynchronous.

Surely, the aforementioned problems were all known for a while, but it took several years until an alternative implementation to solve these issues appeared. Again, it was Ryan Dahl – the original...