There has been a lot of web chatter around the launch of Deno, the new JavaScript runtime engine. Their introductory blog post does a great job of explaining when you should use it (and conversely when you shouldn't, at least yet). It's an impressive post, not least of all because of its transparency. The team behind Deno are open about the shortcomings of NodeJS and the fact that a large-scale overhaul would now be virtually impossible. Rather than create Node2, they've created Deno, which seeks to solve a lot of the same problems but not necessarily in the same way or with the same ultimate scope. That's a pretty savvy move in my opinion.

It's also really interesting to see them take a swing at npm as a not-particularly-great ecosystem structure:

Furthermore the mechanism for linking to external libraries is fundamentally centralized through the NPM repository, which is not inline with the ideals of the web.

I'll be intrigued to see if Deno and Entropic end up with a tight relationship as a result.

Most of what the blog post goes into flies straight over my head, but the notes on improved HTTP server performance and their commitment to stability both caught my eye. This is clearly a product which has been thought through, not just on paper but with the benefit of (heaps of) actual experience thanks to NodeJS' popularity. Sounds very intriguing.

Also, I'd just like to take a moment to note both the excellent URL choice (deno.land) and the adorable mascot art: