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Deno climbing to the top of 2022

Deno in 2022: npm, Edge Functions, Series A, Fresh, and more

2022 was a big year for Deno! We:

  • have over 250k monthly active users
  • stabilized npm compatibility, which will be an integral part of Deno going forward (more on that below)
  • have been downloaded over 5 million times
  • launched Fresh, a Deno- and edge-first framework that embraces modern web principles
  • partnered with Netlify and Supabase to power their edge functions
  • supported Slack with the launch of their platform
  • raised $21M from Sequoia Capital and grew the company to 17 people

Let’s dive into notable updates of 2022.

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npm compatibility

Our biggest update was stabilizing npm compatibility in the Deno CLI, which allows you to use npm modules with an “npm” specifier. With the ability to import npm modules, you can now use data storage modules, frameworks, and much more, to build your projects.

While the work here is not yet complete, we’re committed to making npm compatibility a core part of Deno, and will continue to iterate on this until we get it right. We have many exciting plans here to make using npm even easier with Deno, and will be announcing them later this month.

Have any feedback on npm and Deno? We’d love to hear it in this survey.

Fresh

We built and launched Fresh, a Deno- and edge-native modern web framework focused on simplicity and performance. It embraces modern technologies and progressive enhancement, using server-side just-in-time rendering and sending zero JavaScript to the client by default.

Fresh demonstrates what it’s like to re-imagine a web framework using modern technologies: you get native TypeScript support, minimal latency by sending zero JavaScript to the client by default, zero-config islands functionality, and best of all, no build step. All this while making it easy to get a perfect pagespeed score.

Not only do we love using Fresh (we’ve used it on all our sites, including Merch and Deno News), but so do developers on GitHub, who have helped the framework rocket to one of the top starred GitHub frontend projects in 2022. For more production uses of Fresh, check out our showcase page.

We’re working on new features for Fresh in 2023 that will make spinning up a full stack web application easier than ever before, including persistent data, caching, etc. Stay tuned!

Deno Deploy and Edge Functions

It was also a big year for our edge hosting service, as we launched pricing for Deno Deploy, as well as partnered with Netlify and Supabase to power their edge functions.

Our Deploy users continue to praise its speed (a deployment only takes a few seconds), thanks to its V8 isolate cloud based infrastructure. Many of you expressed interest in building full fledged apps on Deno Deploy, so we’re working to provide persistent data storage and more.

As more users discover the power of edge functions (here’s why we think it’s the future), we’ve learned that many platforms and businesses are interested in using our edge infrastructure to enable their users to run their own edge functions or custom services. Going forward, edge functions will be a major pillar of Deno’s hosting products, and we aim to be one of the core companies driving the adoption and advancement of edge functions.

Growing the company with Sequoia

We raised $21M in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital to help us continue building the next generation of developer tooling for the web. Our investors recognize that today’s developers struggle with endless complexities, conventions, configuration, etc. when building web services. With this funding, Deno has gained years of runway, as well as the opportunity to grow our team and product roadmap in response to the demand we’ve been seeing.

Also, if you’re interested in working with us, we’re hiring!

Deno 2.0 is on the horizon

With such positive feedback to Deno’s npm compatibility, we’ve been solidifying our plans for Deno 2.0. Our goal remains building the fastest, easiest, and most secure runtime, but our next major update will include big improvements that will make web development easier and better than ever. We’re still working out some details, but stay tuned in the coming weeks for a more detailed picture of our roadmap.

Help improve Deno by taking our survey.

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