The yt-dlp project uses Deno as its default and preferred JavaScript runtime when downloading YouTube videos (this replaced their own handwritten JS interpreter). Fortunately yt-dlp also has support for Node and QuickJS as well as deprecated support for Bun, but I don’t think any of those were preferred by the project for various reasons such as portability, security and I think also speed.

See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404, https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/15012, and https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS.

This is a wild detail to just bury at the bottom. So many companies went all-in on Deno in recent years. Some even did major migrations off Node.js. Sucks for them I guess, but that's always the risk in chasing the shiny new thing over sticking to the old and dependable.

So "Deno" isn't joining Cloudflare, Deno is effectively defunkt and its former team is joining Cloudflare.

I don't like how that's in the Deno post but gets no mention in the Cloudflare post. Seems like a pretty important detail!

So they don't want to buy Deno, they want to buy the team to work on something cloudflare specific.

Funny that with Bun being acquired by Anthropic, if this big bet on AI doesn't work out we'll end up right back where we started; Node. Obviously Deno will still be OSS, Bun would likely end up that way too, but you get the idea

Oof.

The writing had been on the wall though, ever since Bun's rapid success with their alternate strategy. Deno quickly started removing its opinionated stances and playing catch-up on Node compatibility.

I loved their original vision, and I'm glad they tried. They had some really cool ideas for a better world of JavaScript, and I do think they placed some pressure on Node and made it better in the process. I'm also glad they're getting a buyout for their hard effort, even though it's probably more about hiring a team of skilled JS runtime engineers than about acquiring the technology.

RIP Deno

Why would they acquire them then shut it down? Is there a reason for that?

This is the real headline... and more so that it has been hidden away.

Genuine question, is this legal under US anti-monipoly laws?

I don't really know anything about that area, but didn't Facebook get in some trouble for purchasing Instagram in part due to them being competition.

Surely buying a company out only to close their main offering is defined as anti-competitive?

The CloudFlare blog concludes with:

"By bringing celld and workerd together, we want it to be radically easy to build and operate distributed applications on your own infrastructure."

It does not appear they are close sourcing it. He mentions workerd is open source. Roadmap needs better communication but it appears people will be able to switch to new merged OSS version. It's just not well defined what it looks like yet.

The fate of many forks, while reference implementation keeps chugging along adopting the most relevant features.

Thats really upsetting ngl.

Interesting. I guess open source is not as dependable as it used to be

Damn that sucks. I love Deno. It really should have ‘won’ the runtime race. Oh well.

I'm saddened by this, and will now need to plan for some migration work in a couple of production projects. Sigh.

I missed this when I skimmed the post. Sad stuff. I'm a big fan of deno.

Fuck me! We’re going to have to start our migration as soon as possible. I knew we were in a precarious spot after the layoffs, but this is a truly sad outcome.

Hmm ... so why would they acquire it to let it die?

Shame- it is my favorite Markdown formatter.

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I mean we already have a winner (Bun) and it just means that Deno has admitted defeat.

From what is likely going to happen is that Deno will be donated to the Linux Foundation to avoid this.

Kinda feels like a rug pull, similar to Bun.

Which any existing user can just do?