This month’s update reviews our 2023 changelog, the 1.40 release, the new Deno Deploy Learning Playground, the Deno Subhosting Hackathon winners, and more.

Deno in 2023

We had a productive 2023 with a lot of new features and improvements in Deno. Here’s a mini changelog of Deno:

• Deno now understands package.json files and has the ability to import built-in Node modules using node: specifiers like node:fs and node:crypto. Read more.

• A new web server API, Deno.serve, was stabilized and HTTP throughput improved ~73% over the year.

• deno compile got support for workers, dynamic imports, and npm modules.

• Jupyter, the open source notebook tool, added support for JavaScript and TypeScript using Deno.

• WebGPU was finally added to Deno after nearly a year of development.

and much more.

We’re working hard to simplify developer experience across the entire stack ahead of Deno 2. If you want a sneak peak, click here.

Read the full blog post ⇒

Deno 1.40: Temporal API

Date time manipulation and parsing is one of the most frustrating aspects of engineering. And JavaScript’s native date time implementation leaves a ton to be desired. That’s why devs are foaming at the mouths at the Temporal API proposal — designed to address shortcomings and complexities with Date in JavaScript.

Temporal, actively implemented in all major JS engines, is now supported in Deno (with the --unstable-temporal flag):

const birthday = Temporal.PlainMonthDay.from("12-15");
const birthdayIn2030 = birthday.toPlainDate({ year: 2030 });
console.log(birthdayIn2030.toString());
// 2030-12-15

console.log("day of week", birthdayIn2030.dayOfWeek);
// day of week 7

In addition to Temporal, we’ve also began a series of deprecations, stabilizations, and removals aimed to streamline migrating to Deno 2. Check out this migration guide to ensure a smooth transition.

Watch the video or read the full announcement ⇒

Deno Deploy: new onboarding tutorials

Deno Deploy not only makes it easy to deploy JavaScript globally within seconds, but also offers a set of cloud primitives — Deno KV, Cron, and Queues — that become globally distributed for optimal performance.

We’ve updated our Deno Deploy onboarding flow with Learning Playgrounds to introduce these cloud primitives within the context of Deploy. Your new Deno Deploy dashboard now includes a link where you can go over these tutorials:

• creating an HTTP server,

• persisting data to a global KV store with Deno KV,

• building a REST API with Hono,

• setting up real time application with WebSockets, and

• scheduling recurring tasks with Deno Cron

Your new dashboard also includes recently updated projects as well as account-wide metrics.

Read the full announcement =>

From the Community

We recently hosted a Deno Subhosting Hackathon, where participants were asked to submit a project using a cloud IDE powered by the Subhosting API. We had some awesome submissions, including a Deno Blocks, a visual code builder; DenoCode, a cloud editor integrated with ChatGPT, and deco.play, a CMS plus cloud IDE that uses AI to create a Preact component based off an image you upload. Thanks for participating!

Want to build your own cloud IDE? Check out our tutorial, video, and starter template.

Deno #Showcase

• Just Tell Me — get a ChatGPT summary of a YouTube video

• The Shook One — a minimal theverge.com feed reader

• denoflare v0.6.0 is released, with experimental support to deploy the same worker to Cloudflare, Deno Deploy, AWS Lambda, and Supabase Edge Functions

• listn.fyi — built with Svelte and Deno, this mini app is a great way to share Spotify songs

• kivi — this VSCode plugin allows you to view and edit your Deno KV store right in VSCode

For more projects created and shared by the community, check out our Discord’s #showcase channel.

Conferences and talks

Here’s a list of conferences that we’ll be giving talks at.

• JS World Conference, March 1st — Ryan Dahl will give a talk on Deno. Additionally, there will also be the world premiere of the Node documentary.

• Node Congress, April 4th — Kevin Whinnery will give a talk on “The State of Node Compatibility in Deno”.

Other Updates

In case you missed it!

• We hosted a livestream covering the changes in Deno 1.40 and how to prepare for Deno 2

• For Subhosting prospects, here are the pros and cons of using Subhosting vs. AWS Lambda when building out your deployment platform

• Ian Bull writes about the benefits of scripting in TypeScript, web APIs, and Deno

And that’s it for this issue! If you think someone could benefit from this, please forward it along.

— Andy