Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend

After a month of using Node for a SvelteKit client project, the reporter has decided to return to Node full-time. When Deno was the preferred runtime, the reporter found it difficult to adapt to Node's improvements. Node now supports ECMAScript sugar and has modernized old APIs, eliminating the need for the require() function. The reporter experienced issues with NVM and NPM, but settled on PNPM for managing Node versions and avoiding malware.

The reporter encountered challenges with hard-coded binary names in some scripts and added aliases to avoid issues. PNPM blocks post-install scripts, but the added settings in pnpm-workspace.yaml helped delay malware updates. Node now supports TypeScript without throwing errors, although publishing TypeScript packages to NPM is complicated.

The reporter decided to use Tsdown to bundle TypeScript files, despite not being thrilled about the additional dotfiles. The reporter switched Deno to Node for a static site generator, and found only minor changes required. Node v26.10.0 showed a 15% faster build time. The reporter plans to explore performance improvements by utilizing more Node built-in APIs.

Ultimately, Deno's failure to innovate and focus on Microsoft products led the reporter to abandon it. The reporter believes Node has surpassed Deno in many areas and is now the preferred runtime.