Deno is the JavaScript / TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl in 2018 to fix the things he regretted about Node.js — security defaults, native TypeScript support, npm's tooling sprawl, and the lack of a coherent standard library. Deno 2.x (released 2024) added full backward compatibility with npm packages and JSR (JavaScript Registry) as a curated alternative.
Deno's adoption is concentrated in three places: edge functions (Deno Deploy, Cloudflare Workers via Wintercg-compatible APIs), CLI scripts where TypeScript-without-config is convenient, and serverless functions where the cold-start time and security model help. For traditional long-running servers, Node still dominates.