How Node.js Is Evolving to Meet Ryan Dahl’s Deno Criticisms

Node.js released its 15th version last week, continuing its popularity after 11 years, while Deno, an open‑source JavaScript runtime created by Node.js founder Ryan Dahl in May 2020, emerged as a challenger designed to fix what Dahl sees as Node.js’s fundamental flaws, such as security and the heavyweight npm ecosystem.

To understand how the current Node.js maintainers view this new challenger and how they plan to address Dahl’s criticisms, I interviewed Bethany Griggs, a senior software engineer at Red Hat and a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee since 2016, primarily involved in the Node.js release workgroup.

Node.js enables developers to run JavaScript outside the browser, originally intended to execute server‑side code so that dynamic pages could be generated before reaching the client. Today, Node.js is widely used as a back‑end framework for JavaScript, allowing developers to use the same language for both front‑end and back‑end development.

Its high scalability and event‑driven model make Node.js especially suitable for cloud‑native application development.

“Node.js remains one of the primary runtimes for building cloud‑native microservices and back‑end applications,” Griggs said, adding that it is also popular in IoT projects—one notable example being NASA’s use of Node.js to monitor spacesuit data.

Beyond spacesuits, Node.js is no longer the darling of JavaScript development (front‑end frameworks like Next.js have taken the spotlight). Compared with Deno’s cutting‑edge features—such as being written in Rust—Node.js’s development path now appears more conservative, making the incremental upgrade of Node.js 15 unsurprising.

Griggs highlighted that the most important update in v15 is the default throwing of unhandled exceptions, giving developers immediate feedback even if they forget to handle errors. This is a valuable technical improvement, though unlikely to spark heated discussion on Twitter.

Response to Ryan Dahl’s Criticisms

I was curious whether the Node.js project team has introduced new developments or fixes to address the concerns Ryan Dahl raised in recent years.

Several years ago, Dahl gave a talk titled “Ten Things I Regret About Node.js.” The main point was that the runtime was not as safe as possible; Deno was created to solve this by being secure by default, requiring explicit permissions for file, network, and environment access.

Officially, Griggs told me that Node.js will “draw inspiration from Deno” on these issues. She also noted that discussions about stronger security and restricted API access have been ongoing since before Deno’s announcement, and the project has experimented with several security features.

However, Griggs does not believe Deno’s security‑first approach is suitable for Node.js, stating that in real applications developers would quickly need to revert to granting many API permissions, which can be counterproductive.

Although the Node.js team is interested in trying stronger security features, Griggs said there is “no compelling reason to adopt the same strategy as Deno.”

Regarding Dahl’s criticism of npm’s closed ecosystem, Griggs believes Node.js has no reason to change it. “The module ecosystem is a very successful part of Node.js. While discussions about the registry continue, the focus is on adding ES6 module support rather than changing the module management model.”

Deno does not use npm; it imports modules via URLs or file paths.

Server‑Side JavaScript Remains Powerful

With the rise of JS frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby and the popularity of Jamstack static‑site generation, I asked Griggs whether this has impacted how JavaScript is used on the server.

She replied, “It may reduce the use of template engines for server‑side rendering, but Node.js is still heavily used to build microservices that serve the static pages deployed by Jamstack approaches, and it continues to be a core part of many front‑end development tooling pipelines.”

The Future of Node.js and Deno

What lies ahead for Node.js? In the Node.js 15 announcement, Griggs wrote that after celebrating Node.js’s ten‑year anniversary last year, “the project team has started the ten‑year KO for Node.js’s future.”

When asked what improvements the team hopes to make over the next decade, she answered that the high‑priority items are developer experience, stability, runtime quality, maintainer experience, and staying up‑to‑date with technologies and APIs.

These priorities are listed in the GitHub “Values and Priorities” document. Security, a sub‑category of runtime quality, is defined as “responsibly addressing security vulnerabilities.”

Compared with Deno’s ambitious goal of preventing vulnerabilities above all else, Node.js’s ten‑year roadmap may seem less aggressive. However, because Node.js is a stable, long‑standing project backed by large enterprise vendors such as Red Hat, it is not overly conservative. This stability also leaves room for others to think boldly about the future of server‑side JavaScript—the very direction Dahl and his Deno project are pursuing.