Deno has a couple of very good selling points, the main one is that it allows to use JS web browser API's in the CLI, this includes things that range from the Fetch API[1], up to WebGPU even! all in the command line interface.
Besides this, it uses the same module system as the browsers do. The JS module system is in my opinion very well designed and intuitive. No need for AMD or CommonJS or Node require's.
Other good things about Deno is that it includes a lot of goodies by default. In that single binary you get in your command line interface:
- A very very decent and fast bundler (bundling in JS is a mess, the Deno is straightforward and needs no config and no hacks, which, surprisingly is unique in the JS bundling scene)
- Testing library
- TypeScript support (for those that like it)
- Documentation generator
- Linter
- Syntax modifier (like prettier)
- Official VS Code plugin
Unlike Node, it uses Rust to bridge the gap between the JS engine and the OS, and leverages on a lot of very cool Rust libraries.