[crowlKats]

I wouldnt say an iframe and this are in any way shape or form comparable. this is a "full-fledged" website.

> except that if node.land or crux.land go down, you've lost your reproducibility.

Dependencies are cached. This is no different from if npm would go down.

> The only semi-interesting thing here is that this demo pulls dependencies from 3rd party registries via HTTP without an explicit install step

Given that this seems interesting to you, it seems you haven't heard of Deno (https://deno.land). It is not related to node in terms of environment, its a new completely separate runtime.

In regards to your node example, this is fairly different: the dependency pulled in from deno.land is a wrapper around the built-in http server, which does various error handling for you and simplifies the usage. The router isnt a simple switch statement either; its a URLPattern (the web's version of path-to-regexp) based minimal router. Campring these to the node built-ins isnt exactly a fair comparison I would say.

Also on top of this, with node you need a configuration to get typescript working, then you need a package.json, etc etc.

[lhorie]

Yes, I know what Deno is, and when I say "semi-interesting", I mean I'm trying to find a silver lining to praise Deno for. To clarify, the similarity is that this claims to be a "single file" thing by importing the meat of the functionality from elsewhere. Which is not really interesting at all, because using batteries to make websites was already a thing with PHP in the 90s. Or, as I mentioned, it's not that different from just using express or path-to-regexp or lodash or whatever in a typical Node.js setup.

Caching dependencies is very different from general reproducibility. Committing node_modules guarantees that the app works even if the NPM registry were to implode. Try to deploy your deno thing from a cold state (e.g. maybe you're moving to a different AWS region or a different provider or whatever) while there's a deno.land outage and it will blow up. I'm actually curious what this caching story looks like for large cloud fleet deployments. Hopefully you don't have every single machine individually and simultaneously trying to warm up their own caches by calling out to domains on the internet, because that's a recipe for network flake outs. At least w/ something like yarn PNP, you can control exactly how dep caches get shuttled in and out of tightly controlled storage systems in e.g. a cloud CI/CD setup using AWS spot instances to save money.

These deno discussions frankly feel like trying too hard to justify themselves. It's always like, hey look Typescript out of the box. Um, sure, CRA does that too, and it does HMR out of the box to boot. But so what? There's a bunch of streamlined devexp setups out there, from Svelte to Next.js to vite-* boilerplates. To me, deno is just another option in that sea of streamlined DX options, but it isn't (yet) compatible with much of the larger JS ecosystem. </two-cents>

[beeandapenguin]

IMO the silver lining to Deno is incredibly simple: it’s compatibility with the web platform. I’m not sure what you mean by not compatible with the larger ecosystem, as Deno is basically spec compliant except for the Deno namespace (which you can polyfill out).

If you haven’t experienced any pain authoring isomorphic JS with Node, that’s great! My experience has been the opposite of that. But with Deno, everything feels completely web native. You never need to worry about modules, syntax, platform features (even localStorage!), or packages… it just works.

On top of that, all the built-in tooling is high quality and I’ve never felt the need to replace them. A formatter, test runner, bundler, type checker, doc generator, benchmarker, and even the built in deployment platform. In fact, I’ve never experienced a more smooth deployment experience anywhere. There is nothing this cohesive in Node.

If you need one more reason, Deno is arguably the most secure runtime in the world. I would not be surprised to see more corporations start to use Deno for user submitted programs as we’ve seen recently with Supabase and Slack, for this reason.

[ROARosen]

> Committing node_modules guarantees that the app works even if the NPM registry were to implode. Try to deploy your deno thing from a cold state (e.g. maybe you're moving to a different AWS region or a different provider or whatever) while there's a deno.land outage and it will blow up

You can just move your DENO_DIR (cache) along with the rest of your code the same way you can move your node_modules folder.

See: https://deno.land/manual/linking_to_external_code

[onelovetwo]

> I wouldnt say an iframe and this are in any way shape or form comparable. this is a "full-fledged" website.

This is what's called an "analogy".

But your other points are valid.