Deno adds support for private NPM registries

Deno Land has released Deno 1.44, the latest version of the JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly runtime rivaling Node.js. The upgrade adds support for private NPM registries, letting developers use internal packages with Deno by configuring an .npmrc file. Performance of the Deno runtime also has been improved.

Deno 1.44 was announced May 30. Developers can upgrade to Deno 1.44 by running the deno upgrade command in their terminal.

In explaining support for private NPM registries, Deno Land said many large organizations host private NPM registries to manage internal packages. Deno now supports using an .npmrc file to configure Deno to fetch private packages from a private registry. This capability is available when using private packages in a package.json or when importing packages directly using npm: specifiers.

Deno 1.44 also brings performance improvements including reduced memory usage with V8 pointer compression, allowing the V8 JavaScript engine to store pointers more efficiently. This enhancement is particularly useful for scenarios with significant object allocations, leading to reduced memory consumption, Deno Land said. Other performance improvements include faster module loading, faster startups in AWS Lambda, and faster language server performance.

Deno 1.44 also brings numerous Node.js compatibility improvements including the ability to run Next.js applications. There still are issues such as the need to use DENO_FUTURE=1, Deno Land said, but the developers are confident they can quickly work through these issues.

Deno 1.44 follows Deno 1.43, which arrived on May 1 with an enhanced language server. Other new features and improvements in Deno 1.44:

• Deno can connect to gRPC services, such as Google Cloud Platform, using the @grpc/grpc-js client library.
• The Deno standard library is moving closer to stabilization.
• A new, stable DenoexitCode API allows getting and setting the exit code for a program.
• The language server has received performance improvements and bug fixes, including caching for semantic tokens for open documents and fixing JSDoc display in named examples.
• The FFI (Foreign Function Interface) API, for calling native libraries from JavaScript code, updates the handling of u64 and i64 types from native code. Starting with Deno 1.44, they will always be of type bigint, aligning the API with JavaScript’s handling of large integers and ensuring better performance and type consistency.