Replacing node dependency

[Oscar Levin]

For Rob, Andrew, and David A.,

I'm working on a PR that will elevate Doenet support to be closer to what we have for WeBWorK thanks to a new pip-installable tool that generates static PreTeXt (and PreFigure) from DoenetML.  However, this tool uses the Deno tool (a runtime for javascript/typescript/webassembly).  

Turns out this isn't that big of a deal, since Deno has an official pip installable python package that includes the Deno binary.  

This got me thinking: could we eliminate the (soft) dependency on node for pretext?  We would use Deno to do all the current things node does, and this really just adds a python dependency (easy for the CLI to require).  

Claude ran a "spike" to see if deno could handle the entire mjsre workflow, and it can (with a small modification to the mjsre package.json, which apparently was working only by accident currently).

Is this something there is an appetite for?  I'd be happy to shepherd this through if there was.

[Jason Siefken]

This sounds great. Deno has a much better security model than Node :-)

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[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Node is a pain for Windows users, so eliminating the dependency would help there. 

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[Rob Beezer]

Rightly or wrongly, we have cast our lot with Python and XSL. So if Deno is a
PyPi package, that sounds like a plus. Do you still get "node_modules"
directories in lots of places?

> with a small modification to the mjsre package.json, which apparently was
working only by accident currently

And lets fix that no matter what!

I'm really just read-only when it comes to Javascript, so I don't think my
opinion should carry much weight. Of course, rolling this out piecemeal on
bite-sized tasks would be a good approach. Save the big tasks (CSS build,
offline MathJax) for later.

Poking around, I saw a mention of Bun as an alternative. Not clear it is a
better idea. Might be worse. Does have a PyPi package with a binary - which
seems to be all I care about. ;-)

Rob

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[Jason Siefken]

I would advise against Bun. It's a fast-moving package that draws lots of excitement, but it also has many questionable design decisions (and takes shortcuts in the name of speed). Deno is designed by the creator of Node after he realized the security nightmare he created and set out to fix it.

[Rob Beezer]

Thanks, Jason. Consistent with what I have read.

Apparently the rewrite in Rust took AI agents 11 days and cost $165,000 in API
fees. Lines of code, commits, etc are equally impressive. Wild.

Rob

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[David Austin]

I'm not familiar with deno, but I'm definitely interested in removing the node dependency from PreFigure!

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[Bradley Miller]

This removes the “node” dependency but replaces it with an alternative to node.  I’ve had my assistant summarize the advantages of Deno over node, and I get that it was designed to address some security decisions the initial author made, and it removes the node_modules litter.  But at the end of the day it doesn’t remove the dependency on javascript.

So, its not clear to me how much of a win this is for PreTeXt.  Maybe it makes installation cleaner as deno can be installed with pip?  Maybe everything we rely on is supported by deno, but there are plenty of caveats about packages that have deep node ties that are not yet supported by deno.

Brad

Brad Miller
Professor Emeritus, Luther College
Founder, Runestone Academy LTD
Blog: http://reputablejournal.com

Set up a time to meet with me.

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[Andrew Scholer]

Reducing the number of install steps would be a nice win for those getting started.

If deno can handle everything we currently use node for, sounds reasonable to make the switch. Having parts of the JS being built by deno and other parts by node sounds like a mess, so I would vote for all or nothing.

Andrew

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