Deno 2.4 is here: What’s new and what to expect

Deno 2.4 marks a significant advancement in the runtime's evolution, emphasizing production-readiness and a pragmatic developer experience. While enhancing its core tooling, this update reintroduces the deno bundle as a robust feature powered by esbuild, capable of creating optimized JavaScript files without external tools. It also expands deno fmt's capabilities to include formatting for .xml and .svg files and introduces the deno update command for streamlined dependency management. The release further improves test coverage accuracy with the deno run --coverage flag and simplifies script execution with bare specifiers. Additionally, it offers advanced environment control through the --preload flag and a new spec-aligned method for importing non-JavaScript assets directly into the module graph. Deno 2.4 deepens Node.js compatibility by introducing the DENO_COMPAT=1 environment variable and stabilizing Node.js globals, thereby easing transitions for developers. Finally, the update enhances security and observability with stable OpenTelemetry support and more flexible network permission controls, solidifying Deno's position as a powerful and accessible tool for server-side JavaScript development.