Experiments with Deno

I saw the following tweet from Mohsen:

Creator of Node.js has something cooking here:

This is basically Node.js with libuv (and more) swapped with Go IO and network bindings. It has native @typescriptlang support and has a new/better module system https://t.co/oVRlX8vluf

— Mohsen Azimi (@mohsen____) May 30, 2018

And I got excited. While a TypeScript runtime was never an objective or goal of TypeScript, there is an argument that having a runtime, especially for a server side application, is better.

Also, I was recently having a debate with some of my co-workers about how Ryan had stopped contributing to NodeJS because he felt that Go was a better language for creating server side applications. While I can honestly respect that, seeing him provide a runtime for TypeScript indicates that the ubiquity of JavaScript and TypeScript is hard to deny.

So I was really excited to see if I could get it running.

Installation on OSX

This is essentially take from the current version of the readme and modified for common OSX environments. I have assumed that you have Homebrew installed and available as well as the latest full version of XCode with current XCode command line tools.

First you will need Yarn, Go and Protobuf v3:

$ brew install yarn
$ brew install go
$ brew install protobuf

You should setup a $GOPATH environment variable. go will default to $HOME/go if there is no path specified, but that is what I would recommend setting it to anyways. You also need $GOPATH/bin as part of your $PATH.

Then you need protoc-gen-go and go-bindata:

$ go get -u github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go
$ go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...

You need to get and build v8worker2. It takes about 30 minutes to build:

$ go get -u github.com/ry/v8worker2

I got the following error when doing the above, which is expected, because the build is not able to be done by go get:

# pkg-config --cflags v8.pc
Failed to open 'v8.pc': No such file or directory
No package 'v8.pc' found
pkg-config: exit status 1

You then can do the following:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ry/v8worker2
$ ./build.py --use_ccache

Finally you can get deno and its other Go deps.

$ go get -u github.com/ry/deno/...

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ry/deno
$ make

Once it has built, you can validate it is working:

$ ./deno testdata/001_hello.js
Hello World

I then created a symbolic link of deno to $GOPATH/bin so that it was then available in my path.

Experimenting

Once I got it running, I was like WOAH! this is crazy. I fired up Visual Studio Code and started with a minimal tsconfig.json just to ensure that the editor was doing the right thing:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es2017",
    "types": [
      "./deno"
    ]
  },
  "files": [
    "./index.ts"
  ]
}

There is a very limited set of APIs above what v8 provides. But to ensure vscode understood what was available, I copied over the deno.d.ts and added it to the types in the config.

To access this minimal API, you simply import it then as a module, all in ES6 format:

import * as deno from "deno";

I wanted to try these APIs, just to see if I could do something interesting. There is the readFileSync API, which returns a Uint8Array. So I created two little functions to provide reading text and JSON into code:

export function readTextSync(filename: string): string {
  return new TextDecoder("utf-8").decode(deno.readFileSync(filename));
}

export function readJsonSync<T>(filename: string): T {
  return JSON.parse(readTextSync(filename));
}

The simple fact that the code I was editing, in TypeScript syntax, was actually going to be run, was a little mind boggling, but I liked it. If you do have a TypeScript syntax error, deno will pretty print out the error message for you:

/deno-experiments/index.ts:7:43 - error TS2304: Cannot find name 'Foo'.

7 export function readJsonSync<T>(filename: Foo): T {
                                            ~~~

And if you are using vscode, Cmd/Ctrl clicking on the position in the console will take you right to the code (which was also red in vscode).

So I created a test.json file and read it in and logged it to the console. Worked like a charm. I added a few other TypeScript only things, like interfaces, and was loving that there was no transpile steps.

Anyways, I made my experiments available on GitHub at kitsonk/deno-experiments.

Conclusions

I am going to keep a close eye on deno. It could be really innovative, providing a runtime environment with first-tier TypeScript support. There is a lot more I would want to do/understand, like how deno feeds TypeScript its configuration and what the plan is for local package management for things like @types. Overall though, it is super interesting.