Simon Willison’s Weblog

How we built JSR (via) Really interesting deep dive by Luca Casonato into the engineering behind the new JSR alternative JavaScript package registry launched recently by Deno.

The backend uses PostgreSQL and a Rust API server hosted on Google Cloud Run.

The frontend uses Fresh, Deno’s own server-side JavaScript framework which leans heavily in the concept of “islands”—a progressive enhancement technique where pages are rendered on the server and small islands of interactivity are added once the page has loaded. # 12th April 2024, 3:49 pm

Astro DB. A new scale-to-zero hosted SQLite offering, described as “A fully-managed SQL database designed exclusively for Astro”. It’s built on top of LibSQL, the SQLite fork maintained by the Turso database team.

Astro DB encourages defining your tables with TypeScript, and querying them via the Drizzle ORM.

Running Astro locally uses a local SQLite database. Deployed to Astro Cloud switches to their DB product, where the free tier currently includes 1GB of storage, one billion row reads per month and one million row writes per month.

Astro itself is a “web framework for content-driven websites”—so hosted SQLite is a bit of an unexpected product from them, though it does broadly fit the ecosystem they are building.

This approach reminds me of how Deno K/V works—another local SQLite storage solution that offers a proprietary cloud hosted option for deployment. # 12th March 2024, 6:02 pm

The first four Val Town runtimes (via) Val Town solves one of my favourite technical problems: how to run untrusted code in a safe sandbox. They’re on their fourth iteration of this now, currently using a Node.js application that launches Deno sub-processes using the deno-vm npm package and runs code in those, taking advantage of the Deno sandboxing mechanism and terminating processes that take too long in order to protect against while(true) style attacks. # 8th February 2024, 6:38 pm

Announcing Deno Cron. Scheduling tasks in deployed applications is surprisingly difficult. Deno clearly understand this, and they’ve added a new Deno.cron(name, cron_definition, callback) mechanism for running a JavaScript function every X minutes/hours/etc.

As with several other recent Deno features, there are two versions of the implementation. The first is an in-memory implementation in the Deno open source binary, while the second is a much more robust closed-source implementation that runs in Deno Deploy:

“When a new production deployment of your project is created, an ephemeral V8 isolate is used to evaluate your project’s top-level scope and to discover any Deno.cron definitions. A global cron scheduler is then updated with your project’s latest cron definitions, which includes updates to your existing crons, new crons, and deleted crons.”

Two interesting features: unlike regular cron the Deno version prevents cron tasks that take too long from ever overlapping each other, and a backoffSchedule: [1000, 5000, 10000] option can be used to schedule attempts to re-run functions if they raise an exception. # 29th November 2023, 5:49 pm

deno_python (via) A wildly impressive hack: deno_python uses Deno’s FFI interface to load your system’s Python framework (.dll/.dylib/.so) and sets up JavaScript proxy objects for imported Python objects—so you can run JavaScript code that instantiates objects from Python libraries and uses them to process data in different ways.

The latest release added pip support, so things like ’const np = await pip.import(“numpy”)’ now work. # 12th August 2023, 10:14 pm

Deno 1.34: deno compile supports npm packages. This feels like it could be extremely useful: Deno can load code from npm these days (’import { say } from “npm:cowsay@1.5.0”’) and now the “deno compile” command can resolve those imports, fetch all of the dependencies and bundle them together with Deno itself into a single executable binary. This means pretty much anything that’s been built as an npm package can now be easily converted into a standalone binary, including cross-compilation to Windows x64, macOS x64, macOS ARM and Linux x64. # 25th May 2023, 5:01 pm

Making SQLite extensions npm install’able for Node.js, and on deno.land/x for Deno (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to get his “pip install X” trick for distributing compiled SQLite extensions to work for Node too! Now you can “npm install” 10 of his extensions, including sqlite-regex and sqlite-xsv and sqlite-http and sqlite-html and more, and attach them to a node-sqlite3 or better-sqlite3 connection. He’s bundled them for Deno too! # 29th March 2023, 10:13 pm

Playing with ActivityPub (via) Tom MacWright describes his attempts to build the simplest possible ActivityPub publication—for a static site powered by Jekyll, where he used Netlify functions to handle incoming subscriptions (storing them in PlanetScale via their Deno API library) and wrote a script which loops through and notifies all of his subscriptions every time he publishes something new. # 10th December 2022, 12:58 am

Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno. You can now run Deno scripts directly in Netlify’s edge CDN—bundled as part of their default pricing plan. Interesting that they decided to host it on Deno’s Deno Deploy infrastructure. The hello world example is pleasingly succinct:

export default () => new Response(“Hello world”) # 19th April 2022, 4:46 pm

Deno by example (via) Interesting approach to documentation: a big list of annotated examples illustrating the Deno way of solving a bunch of common problems. # 17th March 2022, 1:02 am

Deno Deploy Beta 3 (via) I missed Deno Deploy when it first came out back in June: it’s a really interesting new hosting environment for scripts written in Deno, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl’s re-imagining of Node.js. Deno Deploy runs your code using v8 isolates running in 28 regions worldwide, with a clever BroadcastChannel mechanism (inspired by the browser API of the same name) that allows instances of the server-side code running in different regions to send each other messages. See the “via” link for my annotated version of a demo by Ondřej Žára that got me excited about what it can do. # 7th November 2021, 1:51 am

Deno 1.6 Release Notes. Two signature features in Deno 1.6 worth paying attention to: a built-in language server for code editors like VS Code, and the “deno compile” command which can build Deno JavaScript/TypeScript projects into standalone binaries. The ability to build binaries has turned out to be a killer feature of both Go and Rust, so seeing it ship as a default capability of a interpreted dynamic language is fascinating. I would love it if Python followed Deno’s example. # 10th December 2020, 1:25 am

Deno is a Browser for Code (via) One of the most interesting ideas in Deno is that code imports are loaded directly from URLs—which can themselves depend on other URL-based packages. On first encounter it feels wrong—obviously insecure. Deno contributor Kitson Kelly provides a deeper exploration of the idea, and explains how the combination of caching and lock files makes it no less secure than code installed from npm or PyPI. # 29th May 2020, 2:36 am

2020 Web Milestones (via) A lot of stuff is happening in 2020! Mike Sherov rounds it up—highlights include the release of Chromium Edge (Microsoft’s Chrome-powered browser for Windows 7+), Web Components supported in every major browser, Deno 1.x, SameSite Cookies turned on by default (which should dramatically reduce CSRF exposure) and Python 2 and Flash EOLs. # 24th January 2020, 4:43 am

GitHub Actions ci.yml for deno. Spotted this today: it’s one of the cleanest examples I’ve seen of a complex CI configuration for GitHub Actions, testing, linting, benchmarking and building Ryan Dahl’s deno JavaScript runtime. # 18th December 2019, 8:49 am