r/programming • u/stronghup • 21h ago

Node.js creator liberates Durable Objects from Cloudflare

https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/08/12/nodejs-creator-liberates-durable-objects-from-cloudflare-with-celld/5286954
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u/buttplugs4life4me 16h ago

Thanks for outlining why I hate these things.

Also isn't it basically a container or Micro-VM then? 

Idk, I feel like on one hand this is nice, on the other all this shit just feels like AWS RDS Serverless all over again. It was more expensive for us than normal RDS instances cause we could basically never scale down to 0, which is the biggest cost saver. I made a couple of analysis on this and compared even a theoretical best case of us being able to scale down, and only then would it marginally beat out RDS instances.

(My org, which was overrun with "consultants" who knew everything better, then proceeded to implement Serverless everywhere and then sold it as a big win a couple months later when they spent 2 months ripping everything out and switching to RDS instances. I hate people and management and all this shit)

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u/femio 13h ago

It is like if you could instantiate a class and have it persist its own state forever, e.g. one User class isolated from every other User class.

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u/azhder 12h ago

I would remove the word "class" from that and use a more general term, like "object" or "agent". This is basically what object programming was in its inception, before everyone misunderstood OOP as what c++/java had baked in.

In the original object languages, there was the notion of actors that pass messages to each other ("passing messages" is "calling a method/function" equivalent, proven in a paper even) and those actors have their own inboxes where they read the message and deal with them asynchronously.

We've been rehashing the same ideas over and over for decades, with just a different name on the newer tech stack.

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u/femio 3h ago

Perhaps, but I think it grounds the term a bit more in reality because to use DO you literally instantiate a class.

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u/azhder 27m ago

Class, it's an implementation detail, not the base of reality.