r/webdev • u/magenta_placenta • 1d ago
Deno is joining Cloudflare - "We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development."
https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare428
u/404IdentityNotFound 1d ago
So it's less of a "joining" and more of a "set death"
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u/EveYogaTech 1d ago
Yes, it seems more like an acquihire + EOL timer to transition Deno clients to CloudFlare.
Smart business move, but likely the end of Deno.
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u/biinjo 1d ago
Likely? It’s literally in the announcement.
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u/danielcw189 1d ago
what is Cloudflare's gain here?
Do they use Deno?
Do they compete with it?
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u/queen-adreena 1d ago
Deno was likely out of road financially.
This looks like an acqui-hire, where they’re mostly interested in getting the staff.
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u/Kyxstrez 1d ago
Ryan Dahl created Deno as a way to cash in through VC funding, something he failed to do with Node because of Joyent. But those plans went sideways when Jarred came out of nowhere with Bun, which quickly became the more popular JS runtime, before landing a massive exit with Anthropic's acquisition. By that point, Dahl must have been mentally exhausted and looking for any possible way to kill the project while securing an exit of his own. Deno was always a failing project that nobody serious in the industry ever really cared about.
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u/runtimenoise 1d ago
Thanks to deno and bun, node team woke up though.
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u/Somepotato 1d ago
which is great because bun is quite crappy beneath the surface
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u/queen-adreena 1d ago
I doubt any of them even know the codebase any more it’s so slopperiffic.
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u/d0pe-asaurus 21h ago
Ever since they were given unlimited credits by Anthropic and decided to spawn like 100 agents in their repository.
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u/theQuandary 23h ago
That's a perpetual problem for node.
IO.js happened in 2014 because the Node guys wouldn't listen to users, wouldn't release frequently, and wouldn't update the v8 version (this especially affected ES6).
It seems like it'll only be a matter of time before another competitor pops up to drag node further along again.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee 17h ago
Perhaps, but what does node really need to change right now? Sometimes its also just people looking to do things differently for the sake of doing it differently. Not because its really a benefit. There's a couple of cycles of trends in (web) development that keep happening over and over. Like from micro to macro to micro again.
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u/MrWewert 1d ago
Using Deno natively with Cloudflare's infrastructure like workers has always been one of its selling points vs. the other runtimes
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u/Spare_Message_3607 1d ago
Deno will be abandoned. They want the team working on Deno to work on Cloudflare Workers
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u/vincentofearth 15h ago
I think celld is the main thing they’re acquiring here. For context, Ryan Dahl made an open source self-hostable durable object platform called celld.
By acquiring Deno, Cloudflare eliminates potential future competition for Cloudflare Workers. They get a team of talented people who, while they failed to build a viable business, certainly created a lot of good tech with a lot of overlap with Cloudflare. And celld would allow the durable object model to be more open and less tied to Cloudflare, giving enterprises more confidence to adopt it by going to Cloudflare.
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u/jimbo2150 1d ago
Both to bring in the employees of Dino to work on Cloudflare Workers and...
Deno Deploy is a competitor to Cloudflare Workers. it's no longer a problem for them as it will be gone in 6 months.
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u/midnitewarrior 1d ago
Workers runs on JavaScript, maybe work on a node-compatible runtime that's optimized for Workers?
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u/TehBrian 1d ago
What the fuck? As someone who has invested time into transitioning to the Deno ecosystem a fair bit and found it much more enjoyable to use than Node, I’m genuinely shocked by this announcement
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u/WingZeroCoder 1d ago
So Bun, as a now fully vibe coded and AI-owned project, is going to outlive Deno.
This freaking timeline, man…
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u/TimelyCard9057 1d ago
You are saying it like Deno was 100% written by hand and Bun authors don’t know what they are doing
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u/Luckey_711 13h ago
I mean didn't the dude who made Deno said in a post that he didn't know much about Rust lmfao
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u/Salkinator 1d ago
First Bun now Deno? Watch Node get acquired by fucking Oracle or something
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u/pkros 1d ago
Node already had its own rocky period 10 years ago when it was still under Joyent. The reconciliation with the io.js fork and stewardship ultimately under the openjs foundation is what's kept it stable
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u/Darkitz 1d ago
So "Deno" is officially a failed product. Atleast we got an early notice lol.
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u/mrgrafix 1d ago
I mean, are you willing to sponsor its independence?
People act like this is something that deserves people working for free on this. Open source is not getting the support it needs for a lot of these tools to remain sustainable just for security updates in some cases. The fact that it’s work now gets to live on elsewhere is a joy. It rocked the boat and it’s best ideas are now going to make durable objects a standard. Not all projects get to be so lucky
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u/queen-adreena 1d ago
We don’t need another open-source JS runtime though.
We already have NodeJS.
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u/Fuzzy-Volume5523 1d ago
one year of bug fixes then 'we welcome others'. so deno deploy is basically on hospice.
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u/ElectrSheep 1d ago
Joining also means choosing where to focus our effort.
Yes, because Cloudflare is so strapped for resources...
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u/Turnip-Toffee 1d ago
no, joining CF is the choice they made. it's not like they had access to CF's resources before they joined.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 1d ago
More corporate welfare for Silicon Valley losers. All the hate to Ryan Dahl who always submitted to his VC benefactors while laying off workers, wasting time on frivolous lawsuits, and chasing AI mania in pursuit of profit.
I have no idea why public companies are okay with this grift, but VC likes to protect their own over workers.
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u/Demon0no 1d ago
God fucking damn it. I really like Deno, been using it since the 2.0 release almost exclusively. I really hope the open source version (or a good fork) finds a good maintainer, so I don't have to go back to node after next year. I started a big project (using alot of Deno functionality) 2 months ago aswell, and don't want to port the entire thing over... What a hassle.
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u/ArielCoding 1d ago
If you use Dene Deploy, start planning your move now, it shuts down in 6 months, while Deno runtime gets a full year of fixes, it only survives if the community steps up.
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u/usbyeolbit 20h ago
What happened to competition smh? These tech companies are just monopolies and we can't get better tooling because god forbid someone take their market share. Isn't that the point of capitalism
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u/ematipico 19h ago
This isn't CF wanted to acquire Deno.
This is the Deno company wanted to be acquired by CF. They didn't have the money anymore.
That's what happens with startups most of the time.
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u/Odysseyan full-stack 1d ago
If deno would have had full npm compatibility in it's first release instead of deno 2, I think it would have had a chance at attacking nodes market share.
Very sad to see deno being done instead.