Cloudflare acquires Deno

> 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.

So unless someone else picks up development, Deno will no longer be supported.

I loved early Deno and am sad to see it die. I invested heavily in the Deno ecosystem because of Ry’s initial vision for it.

But I stopped because I saw this coming the moment they changed course and started putting npm compatibility as a priority. Deno’s surface area went from beautifully simple to very bloated. I think they felt the pressure of VC funding and just gave up on rebuilding Node from first principles.

The silver lining is that early Deno was so good that Node copied some of its features. So at least we have a better Node now.

"Deno development effectively shut down via a Cloudflare acquihire" would be a better headline.

So the developer tooling consolidation/acquisitions continue... hmm!

- Cursor -> SpaceX

- Astral/uv -> OpenAI

- Stainless -> Anthropic

- Bun -> Anthropic

- Astro.js -> Cloudflare

- Deno -> Cloudflare

- VoidZero (Vite, etc.) -> Cloudflare

- NuxtLabs -> Vercel

- Hugging Face -> NVIDIA

- ... what else?

RIP, my favorite JavaScript runtime, and thank you. You were too secure for this world.

What kind of business move is this for Cloudflare? celld is a more complete Cloudflare-at-home runtime than current workerd. What does Cloudflare stand to gain from commodizing Workers?

I'll say that although I'm not really a Cloudflare Workers user, I've been eyeing workerd and celld with interest. The idea of a complete backend in a box appeals to me (see also: PocketBase, Algernon). At the same time, the acquisition means that another company won't acquire Deno for celld.

A lot of the comments are on sunsetting Deno, but the more interesting part is merging the celld model into workerd.

I've been following celld since it was announced. Bootstrapping both durability and coordination off object storage simplifies so many things for self-hosting. (Yes, ironic that self-hosting has a cloud dependency, but in this case I think justified because S3 has become a widely supported protocol that you can run yourself too).

Will be curious to see the details on exactly how that model makes it into workerd.

I feel it leaves a bitter flavor how Ryan Dahl pushed so hard for Deno and Deno Deploy for years, just to let them die within 1 year and 6 months respectively. Thankfully I don't have any codebases that heavily use Deno features, otherwise this would be a steep curve now.

So is dead for all intents and purposes. And this would’ve happened to Bun if it hadn’t found its killer app (Claude Code).

Another reason why standards matter. Think twice before you bet on that VC funded horse, folks.

I'm very sad Deno is going away, even though I've never used it nor did I plan to use it.

It is a bit hypocritical in a sense. Similar to how I was sad that a local restaurant recently closed down. In the past two years I went there maybe three times total. But I just liked having it there as an option.

Deno had a ton of good ideas but I just never felt confident that it would have the lasting power. Some of the early decisions, like their initial refusal to fully support package.json and the npm eco-system, made me unsure of their suitability as the basis for a business.

But I always wanted them to succeed. In the same way I always wanted Heroku to succeed even though I never used their service.

More options are better. But I guess "use it or lose it" applies. Did I dodge a bullet or contribute to the downfall?

Damn. Deno is a super old project, in 2018 the Nodejs creator did the talk "things I hate about NodeJS" and introduced Deno. It's 8 years ago now, and clearly even though the project was known by most Node users, it didn't gain any traction at all. I don't even remember "the bad parts" that Deno tries to solve, were they that bad at all ? Anyways Node will keep evolving and implement new features, new standards, optimization. I think it's super risky to move to an alternative. In the age of the LLMs, if you wanna get out of Node, you better translate all to native Go or Rust.

To summarize my feelings: Shit!

Deno's ability to import directly from a package registry or even git repo in a standalone TS script without requiring a package.json or similar 'meta-data' file was actually really nice for shell scripting stuff. AFAIK node.js still can't do anything similar?

The Cloudflare side is also worth a read: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/

I’m happy if this means Deno is able to get a second impulse. I use Deno daily and while it’s true that it’s in this weird position where it’s not sexy like bun or enterprise-y like node, it has a great developer experience. a no-surprises runtime that does a lot of interesting things the right way (like compile to desktop to a browser-less webgpu runtime), the vscode extension is flawless and overall the perfect balance of batteries included without bloat.

of course i’m only talking about deno, the technology not deno, the cloud service.

Deno should never have been a business - there's no business model.

And worse for Deno - nodejs may not be great but it's good enough.

And may you never have an incumbent competitor that is is "good enough" - it will be your downfall.

Insane, I'm deeply saddened and embittered, I don't want to go back to NodeJS and I don't find any advantage in Bun. I guess this is my sign to just get off of JavaScript entirely.

Does Cloudflare already use Deno under the hood then? Like the Anthropic -> Bun aquisition

Congrats on the exit :)

Finally, the next step of forking Node is up for grabs:

Node > Deno > Done (anyone?)

This might not be seen in much favourable light by many but IMO Cloudflare has the most elegant serveless PaaS as I have seen to date.

The design and architecture is extremely minimal to the point that all of it can be explained on a single A4 page with a 14pt font including D1 + Durable objects. And I hope that it stays that way.

It has all the primitives that you can wish for to build a software system on top of it be it queues, long running jobs, workflows, pipelines, email handlers, cron jobs and even built in AI models ready for you to be invoked.

ATM - it is extremely cheap, reliable, simpler and more capable than anything out there. Deno itself had very little scope anyway because almost no developer tooling is sellable in this environment even more so post AI. Therefore, it is going to accelerate the Cloudflare platform to be the best in class and hopefully not complex and bloated.

I'm very surprised they are not running with the runtime. That seemed like Deno's secret sauce? The rest of it is very aligned with Cloudflare already, deploy, kv, workers, etc seems like the lower hanging fruit.

I think the biggest thing Cloudflare needs to buy is some sort of Postgres-database service. They've already cornered the market for everything front-end/serverless

This is sad. I was a heavy user of Deno, though I recognized its likely downfall when they laid off a large part of their team in the last year.

This is a real bummer. Work never adopted Deno but I love their model, security posture, and the standard library. I've been less interested in typescript recently, but it has turned into the default for frontend.

On the plus side, cloudflare will get access to some fantastic talent, who can hopefully put their effort into building a better web.

Remember "choose boring technology"?

I had to evaluate Deno vs. Bun vs. Node for a project two years ago, and chose Node. I think Deno has good ideas but often times these projects cannot reach escape velocity, especially when they're constrained by VC motives.

Cloudflare really be buying up everything

Well this sucks. My blog is based on deno as I wasn't a fan of node.js at the time. I guess I'm gonna have to rewrite my blog engine.

Well this is very stupid. Why not move Deno to be based on workerd or something? or vice versa? throwing it away is such a waste.

I was rooting for Deno so much as I was fighting with node for years. Luckily I made full transition from JS last year and not comming back.

RIP Deno. Goes into the bin, after Bun.

Didn’t they have a flashy lawsuit to free the JavaScript trademark? What happens to that now?

No indication cloudflare would pursue that yet that I see.

anthropic + bun vs cloudflare + deno, could it be counter move for building from agent sandbox that runs on the edge?

Last year it was bun, and now it is - Deno!

What's happening to JS platforms? I thought Deno has a much better approach to building a platform.

Node always felt so annoying to deal with. I was really excited when Bun and Deno were coming up. Pour one out.

Genuine question. Why are companies buying our runtimes ? What is the advantage ? Maintaining open source and having more adoption in specific softwares like runtimes and programming languages helps keep software more robust and reliable right ? Am I getting something wrong.

This is mostly to be expected.

After Deno did layoffs we saw a consistent decline in announcements and innovation.

Sad day, but unsurprising.

All of this just re-informed my believe to stay with true and tested systems that have survived decades. C if I fell confident and Common Lisp otherwise. Both standardized, have been around for ages, and they don’t disappoint.

I feel bad for anyone that now relies on Deno. And as good as Cloudflare might be for some things, I also feel bad for anyone relying on them.

If this was done to kill celld as a runtime that would be unfortunate.

edit: my reaction was too soon, it seems like they will be explicitly working on making workerd an open source self hostable runtime

never used deno or paid much attention to it despite all the fancy marketing.

i always wondered how they were making money

A bit worried what will become of https://github.com/denoland/rusty_v8 as it still is the best maintained (?) and featured binding of V8 for rust.

Deno did bring lot of good ideas and hope some of them will flow into Node, especially full typescript type stripping, package less imports to name a few.

Also worth calling out that if you want to disrupt a major player, you need to be 10x better, not just 2x.

Either way, congrats team. Hope you going on to build something great at Cloudflare.

I’ve been using Deno’s permission system as a sandboxed replacement for ‘python -c’ for my agents. Hopefully a better supported runtime (in any language) adds a similar permissions system in the near future.

What is it with everyone buying runtimes? — P.S. Deno always felt like it is going to be abandoned, you can't build your work on this much shaky ground...

I'll sound smug saying it but this is always, always inevitable from the moment Deno took VC investment. Either it was going to be successful enough to take over everything (and it wasn't going to be) or it would end up acquired/shut down.

I know Node is boring but it's not going anywhere.

This shows that there was no money to be made in their business model and they had to sell to make up for the years or losses accumulated.

Inevitable for a project like this when you take VC money, unfortunately.

Holy shit, I used to work on the Workers Runtime Team and I'm surprised!

I have no idea anymore what is happening, and none of the blogposts seem to explain that either. So, if I am to start a new JS or TypeScript project or whatever, what should I choose and why? One runtime used a lot of tokens to rewrite Zig project, one was already Rust, one bought, one rewritten in Go, what is going on?

Man, this year has been nothing but bad news for me. This is disappointing, and really makes me question what is the point if even open source is now this easily enshittified or "killed by [insert big tech co here]." I've spent years now using Deno nearly exclusively for new projects, and saw it as the most sane JS server runtime. This also makes me hesitant to use anything with Ryan Dahl's name on it ever again.

Well this is fucking depressing.

So what's the story with JSR sticking around then? Does it already see meaningful use among people using Workers, or do they just really want an escape hatch in case we see more long-term issues with GitHub and NPM?

And does it at least mean the stdlib will see continued development?

Can't believe they bought out Vite and now Deno. All our toolchains are getting bought out by military contractors

Wow. Just about to choose Deno for something. That not only makes me rethink Deno but ... rethink a lot of things ...