Ten Things I Regret About Node.js - Ryan Dahl - JSConf EU

Heavily focused on event driven HTTP servers Server-side JS required an event loop to succeed, but it wasn’t obvious

Bad design choices, it could have been much nicer

1. Didn’t stick with Promises, async/await since it meant a lot of changes
   

1. Security Security is delegated to V8, and by default all has access to computer and network (e.g. your linter has)
   

1. The Build System (GYP) The biggest regret V8 started using GYP dropped it for GN, Node is the only user of GYP Should have been a Foreign Function Interface (FFI)
   

1. package.json
   
2. require() to load files, included npm in node, which contributed to centralization and introduced the concept of a module as a directory of files (not a strictly necessary abstraction)
   
3. unnecessary noise (License, Repository, Description)
   

1. node_modules One folder per project means a “virtualenv” cannot be used across many projects
   

1. require(“module”) without extension “.js” Less explicit, different from how browser works .js, .min.js, .ts, … → different files
   

1. index.js thought it was cute unnecessary after package.json
   

Problems with node are almost entirely around how it manages user code
Focused on I/O early on, module was an afterthought

Deno, a secure TypeScript runtime on V8

• Secure by default
  
• Scripts run without any network/fs access
  
• Users can opt in access via flags
  
• All systems call are done throught message passing, instead of multiple entrypoints, only two native functions, send and recv