Office Hours Roundup and Update

This post will go over Q&A highlights from our last two live events and updates about Office Hours going forward.

To cut straight to the chase:

• We’ll begin streaming our live office hours on our YouTube channel in addition to hosting it on our Discord server. Our next event will be Friday, February 24, 2023, at 9:00 AM Pacific Time / 12:00 PM Eastern. RSVP for the Discord event or our YouTube.

• We’ll have themes for each event. Themes will set the tone for stories that we share while we’re not taking questions from participants.

• We’ll publish follow-up content if something comes up that’s worth singling out for wider awareness (or just really funny!), but since the events will be streamed, we won’t be maintaining transcripts any longer.

The events end up being half Q&A and half socializing about work, so we’re embracing and encouraging that as a theme.

We’re excited about these changes because they’re what you asked for, so we’re certain that we’re hosting a program that people really care about. We deliberately tried to avoid imposing too much structure early on so there would be room for all of you to run with it, and we’re so happy that turnout has been so great!

Interested in asking the team a question? Great! Read On!

If you want to ask questions, please continue to ask us in Discord. We’ve got extra hands on our discord server helping make sure hand raises on the stage and questions from chat are acknowledged and asked. We’ll do our absolute best to extend this to all other places we’ll stream, but Discord is ideal if receiving an answer to your question is time-sensitive.

If you think your question might require some research on our part to answer (such if it’s about the business, direction, strategy, etc) or if it requires a lot of context for consideration, consider asking in our #office-hours channel in advance so we have some time to prepare.

We’ll send out links to the individual streams via our social channels and at the event itself once we kick off and start broadcasting. Here’s the event link on Discord again for convenience. If Discord isn’t your thing and you want to watch, RSVP on our YouTube.

What about the theme?

Oh, right! The theme!

The theme for our next event is…

You can go back in time and arrive fully prepared to take advantage of any significant event in software history. What do you do?

An example could be building something like ngin-x right when Apache started to become popular.

We hope there will be some fun discussion around this topic at our next Office Hours.

Questions & Answers

Should version references be hard-coded in imports for dependencies?

Yes, because these refer to functionality in the module at the version you used when creating your app; increment versions here like you would other dependencies. This works the same for publishing and consuming libraries (and generally, libraries have some kind of version constant that external build systems can use for specification).

Is making Deno available on all platforms where developers write code (including Mobile) part of the vision?

Not right now, but mostly because hitting all of those platforms (mobile, in particular) would be extremely difficult and against the backdrop of everything we’re currently working on, extremely difficult to prioritize.

Would the Deno team consider taking over [very popular project] if the maintainer had to leave?

It’s difficult to say because as we’ve seen, even small projects can become big linchpins if they break. We can’t think of a situation where we’d agree to take over a project, but we would certainly investigate using our platform to help projects in the Deno ecosystem find a new maintainer if there was a need.

On Node support, the HTTP module doesn’t currently handle events and web sockets, any plans to change that?

There’s a lot of additional work going into the CLI in order to make the Node compatibility layer handle that and other things left to go. We don’t have a firm ETA on when it will ship, but we are working on it.

What would make Deno consider something new for inclusion in the standard library?

This is difficult to answer and sometimes even more difficult to define; while we can be very clear that we’re extremely stringent about what should be in there, when things make sense they just tend to make great sense. The best thing to do if you’re curious is write about a use case and start a conversation and we’ll see where the discussions go. It’s definitely uncommon, to say the least.

Could a Deno Developer share what feature they would magic-wand in place if they had one?

Permissions for individual imports, currently one of (or the) oldest issue in our tracker and it would be absolutely amazing if we could implement it, but it’s just not possible currently at the language level.

How would Deno handle deprecating Run in favor of Command look? Or other similar changes in 2.0?

Deprecation is a process, not a state. You can use deprecated things just as well as you always did, but at some point in time, things that people aren’t using any more because better alternatives exist will need to come out in order to make room. It’ll be a relatively slow process with ample communication around changes.

Can Deno pass custom runtime flags to V8?

Yes! Deno has the --v8-flags= option. When used, whatever flags are passed as the next argument will be passed along to V8. If you need to pass multiple flags, encase them in quotes. Please note that there are a lot of possible flags V8 supports; if you want to search for them, you can use a tool like grep to filter them out, and less / more to paginate the results (thanks to Skye from Discord for the idea):

/path/to/deno run --v8-flags="--help" | grep (expression) | more

We also have some general conversation highlights!

• We do have a blog feed which took a surprising amount of investigation to uncover.

• Everyone seems to have their own slightly unique take on semicolons as follow up to Andy asking how everyone felt about deno fmt now having them configurable. One thing everyone is sure about, be consistent, whatever way you go!

• Our entire backlog of Deploy service pricing and metering questions were answered by the launch of our Amazing new Deploy landing & info page, so please have a look there if you were among the curious!

• Maintainers as well as advanced users would really like more content about packaging best practices, especially when it comes to FFI. Andy and Aapo (AapoAlas in Discord) have been producing a YouTube series, “WTF is FFI?” on getting started with FFI. Follow the code here.

• Andy And Tim are excited about our user survey and can’t wait to talk about more results soon, but for now we’re wondering, does anyone have any magic wishes for Deno’s documentation? Folks indicated that it could be improved, but weren’t very specific, so we just want to let everyone know hailing frequencies are open!

• Artwork / Illustrations from our blog posts are licensed under the MIT license, in case anyone needs to know.

• We talked about signs seen placed by sleeping babies while their parents try to get some work done. Tim shared his favorite, which is “The penalty for waking up the baby IS the baby.”