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Deno 1.4 Release Notes

Today we are releasing Deno 1.4.0, our largest feature release yet. Here are some highlights:

If you already have Deno installed you can upgrade to 1.4 by running deno upgrade. If you are installing Deno for the first time, you can use one of the methods listed below:

# Using Shell (macOS and Linux):
curl -fsSL https://deno.land/x/install/install.sh | sh

# Using PowerShell (Windows):
iwr https://deno.land/x/install/install.ps1 -useb | iex

# Using Homebrew (macOS):
brew install deno

# Using Scoop (Windows):
scoop install deno

# Using Chocolatey (Windows):
choco install deno

New features and changes

WebSocket API

This release adds support for the web standard WebSocket API, available in all modern browsers. It can be used to communicate with remote servers over the WebSocket protocol.

Here is a short example of how it works:

// Start the connection to the WebSocket server at echo.websocket.org
const ws = new WebSocket("ws://echo.websocket.org/");

// Register event listeners for the open, close, and message events
ws.onopen = () => {
  console.log("WebSocket ready!");

  // Send a message over the WebSocket to the server
  ws.send("Hello World!");
};
ws.onmessage = (message) => {
  // Log the message we receive:
  console.log("Received data:", message.data);

  // Close the websocket after receiving the message
  ws.close();
};
ws.onclose = () => console.log("WebSocket closed!");
ws.onerror = (err) => console.log("WebSocket error:", err.error);

// When running this the following is logged to the console:
//
// WebSocket ready!
// Received data: Hello World!
// WebSocket closed!

You can try it out locally: deno run --allow-net=echo.websocket.org https://deno.com/blog/v1.4/websocket.js

This release also removes the websocket connect methods from std/ws. Use the WebSocket API instead.

deno run --watch

Deno now has an integrated file watcher that can be used to restart a script when any of its dependencies change.

To use it, run your script like you usually would, but add the --watch flag. You additionally have to add the --unstable flag because this feature is not stable yet.

$ echo "console.log('Hello World!')" > mod.ts
$ deno run --watch --unstable mod.ts
Check file:///home/deno/mod.ts
Hello World
Watcher Process terminated! Restarting on file change...
# now run `echo "console.log('File watching works!')" > ./mod.ts` in a different terminal
Watcher File change detected! Restarting!
Check file:///home/deno/mod.ts
File watching works!
Watcher Process terminated! Restarting on file change...

The watch flag takes no arguments for directories or files to watch. Instead it automatically determines all of the local imports of your script, and watches those.

Currently file watching is only supported for deno run, but in the future it will also be added to deno test and possibly other subcommands.

deno test --coverage

You can now find code that is not covered by your tests using the --coverage flag for deno test. When enabled this will print a summary of your code coverage per file after all tests are run. You additionally have to add the --unstable flag because this feature is not stable yet.

$ git clone [email protected]:denosaurs/deno_brotli.git && cd deno_brotli
$ deno test --coverage --unstable
Debugger listening on ws://127.0.0.1:9229/ws/5a593019-d185-478b-a928-ebc33e5834be
Check file:///home/deno/deno_brotli/.deno.test.ts
running 2 tests
test compress ... ok (26ms)
test decompress ... ok (13ms)

test result: ok. 2 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out (40ms)

test coverage:
file:///home/deno/deno_brotli/mod.ts 100.000%
file:///home/deno/deno_brotli/wasm.js 100.000%

Currently the only available output format is the text summary. Other output formats like lcov and json will be added in the future.

Stricter type checks in --unstable

For all users using --unstable the isolatedModules and importsNotUsedAsValues TypeScript compiler options will be switched on by default now. We will enable these flags by default for everyone in the future. These flags enable some stricter checks in the TypeScript compiler that will likely lead to some new errors you have not seen before:

ERROR TS1205: Re-exporting a type when the '--isolatedModules' flag is provided requires using 'export type'.

ERROR TS1371: This import is never used as a value and must use 'import type' because the 'importsNotUsedAsValues' is set to 'error'.

These errors occur when interfaces or type aliases are imported or re-exported. To fix the error, change your imports and re-exports to use import type and export type. Example:

// Bad
import { MyType } from "./mod.ts";
export { MyType } from "./mod.ts";

// Good
import type { MyType } from "./mod.ts";
export type { MyType } from "./mod.ts";

deno info improvements

The deno info tool for doing dependency analysis has gotten a major overhaul this update. It is now faster and less buggy. Additionally the file size of dependencies is now displayed making it very easy to figure out what dependencies are adding a lot of code to your project.

a screenshot of running `deno info https://deno.land/x/brotli/mod.ts`, which prints the a module graph for the `https://deno.land/x/brotli/mod.ts` module

CSS styling in console.log

Most modern browsers support styling console.log messages with CSS. In our ongoing effort to be as web compatible as possible, Deno now also supports CSS styling for console.log.

To style a message, add a %c format parameter to your message, and specify the styles to apply as an argument to console.log:

console.log("%cStop!", "color:red;font-weight:bold");
// This will print a bold red `Stop!` to the console.

Deno supports the CSS properties color, background-color, font-weight, font-style, text-decoration-color, and text-decoration-line. Support for these properties, and custom rgb, hex, and hsl colors depend on your terminal’s support for ANSI.

a screenshot of running `deno run https://deno.com/blo/blogg/v1.4/rainbow.js`, which prints a rainbow with Deno 1.4 written on it to the console View the source code at https://deno.com/blog/v1.4/rainbow.js

In this release we’ve added support for the final rules required to get deno lint rules on par with recommended eslint and typescript-eslint ruleset. This means that deno lint should be able to catch all errors that @eslint/recommended and @typescript-eslint/recommended can. (At an order of magnitude better performance.) This is a major step towards stabilizing deno lint.

Updates to deno doc

deno doc and https://doc.deno.land has also gotten a round of new features and fixes this release. Support for the export { foo }; syntax has been added (exporting a statement after declaration), and re-exports of multiple symbols with the same name are now supported.

To try out these new features, just browse any module on https://doc.deno.land. It has been updated with the new release already.

Changes in deno.land/std

In this release the writeJson, writeJsonSync, readJson, and readJsonSync functions have been removed from the https://deno.land/std/fs. You can easily switch them out with these functions:

- const accounting = await readJson("accounting.json");
+ const accounting = JSON.parse(await Deno.readTextFile("accounting.json"));

- const accounting = readJsonSync("accounting.json");
+ const accounting = JSON.parse(Deno.readTextFileSync("accounting.json"));

- await writeJson("hello_world.json", { "hello": "world" });
+ await Deno.writeTextFile("hello_world.json", JSON.stringify({ "hello": "world" }));

- writeJsonSync("hello_world.json", { "hello": "world" });
+ Deno.writeTextFileSync("hello_world.json", JSON.stringify({ "hello": "world" }));

Changes to deno_core Rust API

The base subsystem for Deno, deno_core, continues to evolve as we improve the CLI. In 0.57.0, we’ve merged CoreIsoate and EsIsolate into a single struct called JsRuntime. Also an easier facility for creating ops has been exposed. Have a look at the example. to see how these APIs fit together.

Updates to the VS Code extension

The VS Code extension for Deno has had some major feature releases recently. Here is a quick summary:

Remote URL IntelliSense

A great new feature of the extension is IntelliSense for deno.land imports. It gives you autocomplete suggestions for module names on deno.land/x, all of their versions, and their full directory listing. All of this is done without actually downloading the module source code, instead it is all powered by the recent updates to deno.land/x.

Inline deno lint diagnostics

deno lint is now fully integrated with the extension. To enable it, just set the deno.unstable and deno.lint settings in the extension to true. After doing this you will get inline real-time diagnostics for your code:

The full release notes, including bug fixes, can be found at https://github.com/denoland/deno/releases/tag/v1.4.0.

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