Comment by theodorejb

It might not have been a successful project as a VC growth startup, but lots of people saw that coming here in HN when they started raising millions.

In the space of such foundational technologies, there’s always been a vast gap between the number of private vs open-source projects that succeed. Even all the way back to proprietary compilers 40-50 years ago.

If they had stuck to being an open-source project, the kind of adoption and mindshare they achieved would have put them among the most successful ever. And I am sure they would have been able get their team paid very well sustainably. The unicorn model cannot fit every single venture.

Being successful or not depends on the scale of the company. I'd wager at Cloudflare scale, many otherwise decent businesses would have virtually no effect on their baseline and wouldn't be worth running.

It wasn't that long ago that Nodejs was the new kid on the block, and companies were worried it would go under.

As long as the competition forced Node to become better then it's all good.

Or they could pay for their dependencies.

Exactly that. I am really surprised by the amount of comments with this huge sentiment and doom mongering. These days it’s really not a big deal. Million lines of deno based ts is not a problem because pretty much any functionality provided to deno is available for node as well. You probably can migrate off much of the external deps without much hassle. You can even migrate to different language ecosystem altogether like others have mentioned in comments.

It's one of those things that the technical aspect is simple but the paperwork dehumanizes me. Just a couple more bullshit engineering design documents to generate

Node only has experimental permissions support (making it not as good for local scripts), and no WebGPU (though you can import dawn wrapper). Deno desktop is way ahead of anything available for Node.

what other runtime has runtime security features?

Exactly. Probably an hour if you just tell your model of choice to do it for you and implement a logical testing framework.

And this is why deno is exiting.

There's no business here anymore.

Not really. Tons of platform lock in Apis, Deno.serve, KV etc..

You can't just switch over to nodejs

What did it get you?

For my projects, I am used to maintaining package manager configuration, bundlers, linters etc.

So I never had much interest in looking into benefits of Deno or bun.

Yup, Bun is at the mercy of Anthropic, and we know the extents they go to protect their competitive advantage.

Bun always seemed weird because they decided to build it with Zig. I want Zig to succeed, but it's not stable yet.

It reminds me of game engines. If you want to make a game engine, there's nothing wrong with that, but you should acknowledge that you're building a game engine, not a game--or rather, if your goal is to make a game, starting by making a game engine probably isn't optimal.

It's the same for Bun. It's clear that they wanted to build a JavaScript runtime, and also they wanted to use Zig. They are doing both of these things, but when push comes to shove, their desire to use Zig was more important than their desire to make a JavaScript runtime, I believe.

I lead a project built on Deno; it was not my call, just to be clear. Deno turned out unfortunately to be a miss and we had seen the writing on the wall. FWIW, we're moving to a much bigger Rust core program with node for JS user extensibility. (In other words, I'm not willing to risk using the deno_core crates.)

The one silver lining here is that Deno had already increased their node/npm compatibility. Migrating off of the jsr ecosystem and back to npm is going to be less painful than one might imagine. I expect present LLMs to be sufficiently good at the task, for example.

Do these runtimes have some value today? Sort of. But the cost of reimplementing them goes down, down, down. I made two bespoke JS runtimes within a year. Next year it will be even easier.

Deno/Bun see the picture better than I do, and they decided it was the right time for an acquihire.

It probably depends on how much of the deno-specific api is being used, and then how similar that is to whatever you're going to switch to.

https://docs.deno.com/api/deno/

The way i see it, cloudflare acquired celld. Deno was just given a decent burial as part of the package

> I was really surprised that cloudflare was acquiring deno to be honest

It's an acquihire. They hired the people behind Deno

Indeed, seems like it should be pretty straightforward.

I understand why the venture-backed entity couldn't do this, but given the reactions here, could a new maintainer not take over and simply charge for support and future enterprise features like the Sidekiq guy?

Maybe but only if that gives them a competitive advantage.

For me Deno has a really nice security posture, the permissions model is just something I haven't seen in from other runtimes (JS or otherwise). There were other nice features (native typescript support, compilation to a standalone binary), but the permissions model was just unique.

https://docs.deno.com/runtime/fundamentals/security/

Like a decade ago I got into a huge fight with a Staff Eng at our company over Dart. I had just been put in charge of the company's architecture and one of the first things I did was migrate everything to TypeScript (which was relatively new at the time). He was so angry I didn't pick Dart. Good choice by me in retrospect (though picking Angular 2 over React not so much).

well Deno was the only player who could have prevented recent npm security disasters:

built-in permission system for filesystems and etc

just forbid writing to important folders like ~/.ssh

But it is Open Source, so if said companies like Deno enough, all they have to do is pay for its continued maintenance and development. This is one major thing that sets Open Source apart from proprietary software.

> Do they also do their front-end in Dart?

Hey, you jest, but Flutter has a lot of traction!

(I conceptually like Flutter, but I can't get over the Dart thing, so I'm not part of that traction.)

Slack? I think some of their plugins API was all Deno based for a while.

> Do they also do their front-end in Dart?

This is actually a good decision though.

> Companies went all-in in a barely established niche player with 1/100 the traction, instead of sticking with Node, and even better an LTS Node, and are now surprised?

Wait till you hear about this thing called Bun.

Though with a tiny core team and almost carte blanche AI credits, they are a lot leaner.

I dunno, we've been using pnpm for years now without issue, and it's been faster and a little more secure to boot!

Afaik it's used more for circumventing anti-bot measures and solving challenges than the download handling itself.

What makes Deno more suitable for this than any other runtime? It's just executing JS code right? I wouldn't think this would leave any meaningful fingerprint.

When downloading huge media files, the only speed you're being limited by is your bandwidth.

Everything else is completely negligible.

> there wasn't a ton of explanation given beyond the general vibe of "ai bad"

I'm very bullish on AI, but vibe-porting the piece of software you're the main maintainer over a few weeks without letting anyone in the community know and pushing that as a fait accompli to both your userbase and your open source community is definitely the kind of behavior that makes you not trustworthy enough to depend on.

The vibecoded rewrite led to the deprecation of support for Bun but I believe Deno was already the default. Also Bun had the note “No permission restrictions available. Scripts have full file system and network access.”

If I remember correctly, Deno was always priority number 1 due to having a permissions system. Bun's removal due to the rewrite had people complaining using Deno as the focus as Deno's development shifted towards being LLM heavy. Node now supporting permissions would likely be the priority now.

There was a ton of criticism beyond "ai bad". A complete rewrite, in a different language, is a brand new project. It doesn't have any where near the hardening as the previous version thousands of deployments. If they had done that exact same thing but without AI people still would have been upset.

> As I recall, they picked Deno over Bun during the whole vibecoding rewrite fiasco from six months ago, and there wasn't a ton of explanation given beyond the general vibe of "ai bad".

Your comment is baffling. Either you lost track of the story or you've opted to post a very simplistic take on the whole Bun fiasco. Bun's ill-advised rewrite had zero technical grounds and the radical drop in release cadence in spite of all the AI backing suggests the project's foundation lays on shaky ground.

isn't that fairly irrelevant if Deno dies out? Does anything else use JSR?

There's no need to excuse this behavior. People who write announcements like this are dishonest to their core.

well I just don't get it -- why?

unless cloudflare's CEO is a friend of cloudflare people, so just want to financially them bail out...

...why acquire and kill? cloudflare can have more outreach and reputation by keeping deno alive

Thanks for chiming in Kenton.

> workerd and its semantics are not exclusive to Cloudflare infrastructure

I believe they are. You may be able to run workerd, but you can't run D1 (Sqlite alternative), you can't run KV or Queues (please correct me if I'm wrong).

All those are primitives that already exist in the non CF world: KV can be easily redis/memcached. Queues, Kafka and so on. I believe that a system that reuses those would be stronger.

> I really wish I was allowed to say who because one of the users is hilariously ironic

Ok, this peaked my curiosity. Would be great if you could share it!

From a quick search, it looks like they raised $21 million in funding half a decade ago (after an earlier seed round), so this seems less like a reflection on the nature of open source in general and more just a reflection of this one project. It was set up in a way where development was happening because people were being paid to do it, and this time next year, they won't be. Maybe the community would have come in to try to keep it going if there wasn't any funding, or maybe it would have just stopped seeing any real development, but we can't really say for sure either way.

> consortium of companies invested in using the runtime

I believe this is very unlikely to happen. If the founder (Ryan) was involved in it or it have strong market position, it would have strong chances.

Now, is a kingdom without a king and without strong companies to steward it forward. I hope to be wrong though!

We need them so you can pick and choose the one that works best for your current project.

But that points to an important aspect of the platforms-game: The interface between the runtime and everything else should be standardized, to support true pick-and-choose.

I believe it indicates a healthy market and pushes competition and better outcomes for customers. In this case, Deno pushed Web primitives for Node.js and Bun pushed forward on speed (and helped Node.js work on their numbers better).

This have a similar analogy with browsers. Back then when Internet Explorer was the only supported browser, the websites were not evolving as fast. When Firefox pushed it forward and then Chrome, customers won (better and faster sites).

Well it keeps all the node developers away from my shit so I'm happy :)

I wonder how easily could you port celld to Node.js?

> develop proprietary software

This is a weird strategy to stake future IP value on in the age of AI. With competent and fully qualified team, anyone should be able to reverse engineer this idea and build a roadmap for their own implementation. Especially in the world of open source.

read the Cloudflare post, basically the opposite of that: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/

Did they replace V8? Nope.

It's good for everyone but the community, unless I'm looking at it wrong

US v. Paramount separated movie studios from movie theaters.

Sumner Redstone came from a movie theater family and formed modern Paramount by buying Viacom (which was spun out of CBS due to antitrust), Paramount, and then later CBS itself. He was able to buy Paramount as a cinema owner because the government abandoned the rule that you couldn't own both the studio and the theater in the 80s.

The corporate history of Hollywood is long and complicated. Skydance is obviously a big topic this month, but Paramount was owned by the Redstone family's National Amusements theater for as long as many of the adults on this site have been alive.

California has chosen not to get involved - they threatened to then backed down.

Workers against Deno Deploy? And even if you don't count Deno as a whole in the same market as Cloudflare it's still shady as hell. They had plans to buy out a company with the explicit intent to shut down their main product.

You would expect them to integrate Deno with Workers, make a new official managed service that would probably become profitable in no time with Cloudflare's cost optimized infra, or at least commit to basic security fixes until the community finds new maintainers.

What they pulled off instead is the most toxic form of acqui hire ever invented.

Isn't that underselling the opportunity?

I'm sure they'll have a migration path to the cloudflare platform in 12 month.

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Interestingly, Jared Sumner of bun fame is the anthropic guy who pushed claud to find this new limit in the Rieman hypothesis.

Bun being acquired was not an admission of defeat. They are still actively developing.

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