Desktop becomes much more capable
Deno desktop picked up a cluster of user-facing improvements: custom URL scheme/deep-link registration, a new deno check --desktop mode, opacity and transparent window support, better startup/packaging behavior, and fixes for launcher path resolution, project discovery, tray icons, and first-paint flashing. The desktop compile/bundle flow also now runs framework builds first, and runtime serving briefly moved away from the in-process memory channel back to TCP loopback.
Node and npm compatibility got a broad round of fixes
Several long-standing compatibility gaps were closed across the Node and npm surfaces. Highlights include better node:child_process handling of Deno subcommands, named report export from node:process, more complete node:test context/hook behavior, richer process.getActiveResourcesInfo() reporting, safer node:tls shutdown behavior, and support for Node-API finalizers at test worker shutdown. On the npm side, Deno improved dist-tag resolution under min-age policies, fixed pre-release pinning, decoded percent-encoded subpaths, normalized bin names, tightened trust-policy matching, and hardened registry auth diagnostics.
Inspector, runtime, and module loading got stronger
Chrome DevTools can now attach to workers through the inspector, and SIGUSR1 can enable the inspector on demand for running Unix processes. Deno also fixed async module evaluation deadlocks under require(), made URL/URLSearchParams non-serializable like browsers and Node, improved fetch() errors for local files, and corrected a few shutdown and teardown edge cases in sockets and TLS.
Performance work targeted hot paths and copy-heavy operations
This week brought a noticeable internal tuning pass: npm packument indexing was sped up, glob matching got cheaper, lazy source registration was deferred, and several copy-heavy paths were optimized, including stream piping, worker message passing, and wasm fetch delivery. Separately, the CLI parser migration continued with more command definition/help/completion logic moved into deno_cli_parser.
Other misc changes
deno uninstall -gnow supports multiple packages.- KV can now require an explicitly distributed database via env var.
- Deploy, lint, watch mode, and permission handling saw smaller correctness fixes.
- OpenTelemetry crates were bumped to 0.32 with API migration.
- Docs/tooling updates, release/version bumps, and minor test/fixture cleanup landed throughout the week.