PM on part of Cloudflare Workers and someone who was in physical attendance for this talk here.
They're not really directly comparable other than "A JavaScript runtime built on top of V8."
Workers doesn't support TS directly, though you can compile TS to JS and run it, of course. (My team maintains a worker and this is what we do, and it works well)
Deno has its own APIs, as does Workers. Worker's main API is the Service Worker API, Deno's is not.
Workers is focused on V8 isolates as a means of achieving multi-tenency. I don’t believe Deno does anything specific here.
Deno is mostly implemented in Rust, the Workers runtime is written in C++.
Deno is open source, Workers is not.
Workers is being used at scale in production, Deno just launched its 1.0.
I am very excited to see what happens with Deno. :) Fun history: I had been dreaming about doing "Chakra Core + Tokio" a few years back, but didn't find the time. I'm skeptical of the dependency approach Deno is taking, we'll see what happens!
> Workers is focused on V8 isolates as a means of achieving multi-tenency. I don’t believe Deno does anything specific here.
Deno implements the web worker API, which launches different isolates. You could implement something kind of like CF Workers in pure TypeScript, but probably not replicate your resource enforcement.
It's also a pretty good Rust v8 implementation. Before we (fly.io) abandoned our JS runtime we were rebuilding it with that.
Ironically, we also tried Chakra Core + Tokio. It sure would be nice to have a not-google JS engine.
Thanks for confirming, that’s what I meant by “specific”, I was guessing they implemented the spec. It’s just a very big focus of Workers, and I don’t think it’s a focus of Deno. Not good or bad, just a difference.
Ah interesting! Did you abandon it for reasons other than “deno exists”? Would love to hear more about how it turned out, good or bad.
We tossed it because people needed to do much heavier compute than we expected and we realized running arbitrary executables was more useful. It wasn't techniecally bad, just wrong for our customers.
Deno’s existence gives me hope we can bring back the JS API, I'd love to have nginx-as-a-TypeScript-API.
Is it fair to say (a managed) deno is what Cloudflare Workers is? If not, what would be key differences between them?