So unless someone else picks up development, Deno will no longer be supported.
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.
Everything else is completely negligible.
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.
they were stupid to do this in the first place. bun has always been a one man show. what were their plans for when he got hit by a bus?
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.
Unfortunately Node still can't do something like this out of the box (AFAIK at least):
import { Bla } from "npm:bla@^5";
Deno also has a builtin TS type checker, linter, formatter, test runner with coverage support, package manager, language server etc etc... In node these are all separate (and often 3rd-party) tools.
There's no business here anymore.
I wouldn't be surprised if Bun is abandoned at some point as well.
(Which is why I am happy to see new runtimes but never care enough to seriously use or adopt them.)
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
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.
However I now work with software that requires PQC resistance and node's native ML-KEM and ML-DSA abilities made me switch back. Also I'm not particularly an Anthropic fan so that was also a separate nail in its coffin for me.
Finding the right balance of "being responsive to bugfixes, some of which may patch disclosed zero-days" and "not allowing a compromised package to be installed" is tough, these days.
But PKG is not supported by anyone any more (?) and it has an upper limit on the version of Node.js base-image it will support.
If Bun supports compiling executables nicely I hope that feature somehow stays alive and is migrated to other runtimes. Or maybe it can become a standalone tool for exe-compiling?
Node at least picked up --run, TS stripping support, .env loading, watch mode, and sqlite (plus some other things I'm probably forgetting) since Deno started so at least theres that.
Random example: I've worked with many frontend developers who seemed to believe listing dependencies in package.json in devDependencies instead of 'dependencies' controls what ends up in the production bundle.
I'm under the impression few understand that this is only a cosmetic distinction unless you use the package manager's --omit=dev or --production flags during install.
What is included in the production bundle is of course determined by the bundler's dependency-graph reachability from the entry point.
For people who never configured these tools themselves, it's probably difficult to understand how the modern web stack works.
However, nowadays you can probably have AI explain it to you well enough while it fixes the issues.
> I've worked with many frontend developers who seemed to believe listing dependencies in package.json in devDependencies instead of 'dependencies' controls what ends up in the production bundle.
If so many believe that it’s how it should work, maybe it just should work that way. Principle of least surprise and all that.
It also gets messy if you're building 2 or 3 services simultaneously out of the same node_modules dir. E.g frontend, backend, shared, scripts...
Like say you installed only the production dependencies, then you'd be missing the build tools, bundler, etc.
One idea would be to use hooks of your bundler to enforce that each module resolved during the production build is declared in the regular dependencies.
It would be far from a standard solution though.
It's not built in to ESLint, but it's fairly widely used in my experience and helps ensure that you've got a sensible split between production and non-production.
It helps keep all your related packages on the same dependencies. It’s hell for react native sometimes though.
With nx you define the dependencies between your tasks, so that the packages build in the right order and with caching.
I do not think it changes anything about how packages are installed by the package manager or bundled by the bundler.
You can declare build tools in either the root package.json or packages/a/package.json, and I don't think anything prevents you from bundling something declared in devDependencies.
On second thought, I see now that you probably mean it helps keep shared dependencies at the same version when you declare them in the root package.json.
That's a feature of npm/pnpm/yarn workspaces though, not nx itself. And it only works with bundled dependencies, since they would be undeclared in the package itself and thus couldn't be installed externally. If you need that, I think pnpm catalogs would be the right tool.
It works the same way you use a bundler instead of assembling your own and so on and so forth down the tree. The farther down the tree, the less focus you should give your understanding to, but that's not an excuse for giving no understanding below the first layer.
I don't. What do you mean?
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.
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.
- They originally bet on being a TypeScript dialect that didn't quite match the expectations of node in a few small places that ended up mattering hugely.
- One of the original value propositions was "deno compile" and "deno bundle", and those never actually worked well enough to be robust for our real-world use cases (early on they didn't support TLA, then dynamic imports didn't work, then they had issues with ARM compilation)
- Then they simultaneously tried to support node syntax out of the box with npm import specifiers _and_ create a new javascript registry (jsr.io)
- At the point where we expected them to actually make their base-level ecosystem robust, they pivoted to edge compute, and then the writing was on the wall
Deno/Bun see the picture better than I do, and they decided it was the right time for an acquihire.
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?
Then I read that paragraph, and it made more sense that they're acquihiring + killing.
It's an acquihire. They hired the people behind Deno
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?
Do they also do their front-end in Dart?
https://nodejs.org/api/permissions.html - since v20 - Apr 17, 2023
https://nodejs.org/learn/typescript/run-natively - stable and without a flag since v22.18.0 - which sometime after Apr 24, 2024 which was the v22.0.0 release
https://nodejs.org/api/single-executable-applications.html - Added in: v19.7.0, v18.16.0 but still in Active Development (not stable yet) - 2022
For reference, Deno was released in 2020 with all of these features from the start.
Feels like it always take some healthy competition for Node to make big strides like this. Like the whole io.js fork thing a long while ago.
For context: I begrudgingly adopted Vue a while ago after finding React to be too unwieldy, and part of that opinion is definitely related to a poorly written Redux implementation.
It sounds like you're coming at this from a perspective of popularity and thus access to engineering candidates with expertise in it which is fair, but speaking as someone who also went with Angular 2 over React during those times, I'm still using Angular and I'm very happy with it from a technical perspective. Yes, it does mean there are less options for hiring, but it has been a positive experience for my team and for me in my own projects to stick with it.
How well designed the initial versions of TypeScript were can be seen by how smoothly later versions were able to build on them, and even after so many major improvements the language has barely a wart (enums probably being the only one).
Something of its own sign of Microsoft out-engineering some of the hiccups of the ecosystem as a whole. (I started using Typescript < 1 simply because it was the safest and easiest way to write AMD modules also with an eye to UMD or SystemJS output with just a compiler flag change if you needed to ship something compatible outside the house.)
1/3rd of apps on the iOS and Android app store use flutter and that percentage is growing over time. Whereas people are moving away from JS/TS frameworks like React Native.
built-in permission system for filesystems and etc
just forbid writing to important folders like ~/.ssh
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.)
This is actually a good decision though.
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.
Bun's release cadence dropped like a rock after the rewrite, in spite of the radical AI militancy and virtually infinite AI budget.
They should hire a few devs to develop it then.
Language really means nothing these days…
(Yeah I’m salty, I got all in on Deno a year ago.)
FWIW both Ryan and Kenton are very transparent in person, in public, and online over their professional careers. They will and do openly change their minds based on new information and opportunities as time goes along. Both are now founders of open source projects acquired by Cloudflare for the technical architecture talents seeing a future that they would like to build.
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
Aquihiring is a time-tested strategy to build out a team. The Deno folks likely have a bunch of experience that Cloudflare is well placed to make use of
Unless you dangle HEFTY stock options with incremental maturity dates, nothing is else is keeping them from leaving.
That is indeed how this whole thing works. I used to work with several folks who were kicking around FAANG for 4 years till their acquisition stock fully vested
When you consider how much time/money it takes to hire an experienced engineer, and how quickly they are liable to jump to the competition, acquiring an existing team of experienced engineers and tying them with the golden handcuffs is not a bad deal
well... why not tie who's already inside the company (who you actually know about) instead of an external people (who you DON't know about)?
it's much difficult to get info about some external person, and most info is about external reputation ('the looks')
though... that's the reason job-ping-pongs work: someone outside looks better than someone inside, because of your lack of info
- We want to do more work on our runtime and need people to do it
- Those developers for that company over are there working on another runtime
- Buying that company allows them to come work for us without any potential issues from investors in that other company
EDIT: like the whole enthusiasm is that they are buying them because they are generalizing a thing to be NOT a cloudflare thing
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
Deno built celld, which implements the Workers and Durable Objects programming model with self-hosting in mind. Cloudflare says its own distributed infrastructure is too complicated for straightforward self-hosting, and it hadn’t successfully solved that problem. For customers who might be reluctant to commit to being locked in to Cloudflare’s infrastructure, having a rock solid self-hosted alternative reduces that reluctance.
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.
What would they miss out on? A bunch of PRslop? The "open source community" is now dead.
At the end of the day, great engineers armed with great tools are going to outperform anyone who just has the great tools.
Phrased as it being merged into the existing, but I can't help but fret a bit. Is cloudflare willing to let their own core compute product be something available to the world? Absolutely sick wins if so. But I worry celld pretty reasonably seen as a threat.
"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.
Somehow I don't believe that Cloudflare doubling down on their own runtime -workerd, which will be likely migrated to Rust soon [1]- is the right choice (since it push on semantics that can only be run on Cloudflare infrastructure). I strongly believe Node.js semantics are likely the right ones for agents.
If anyone is looking for a full-open source alternative to Node.js that can run everywhere (browsers, phones or servers), please be aware that you can rely and use Edge.js [2] (disclaimer: Edge.js is part of the company that I founded: Wasmer)
No, workerd and its semantics are not exclusive to Cloudflare infrastructure. People really do run it in production without using Cloudflare at all (I really wish I was allowed to say who because one of the users is hilariously ironic...).
Ryan's and Bert's core focus at Cloudflare is going to be making the self-hosting story better.
This was emphasized in the blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/
> 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!
Details remain to be worked out, but part of the goal of the project is to make all these interfaces plugable with reference implementations that can sit on common infrastructure.
In fact, celld has already done a lot of this.
> Ok, this peaked my curiosity. Would be great if you could share it!
You'll have to find me in person over drinks somehow. ;)
that's an interesting reflection on the nature of open source - in theory the source is there and "the community" could conceivably continue development. especially in the case of something like deno where the people most motivated to keep it alive are already programmers. but the reality is that however distributed an open source project is in theory, in practice it needs a single entity to steward it, otherwise it will die.
hopefully that single entity can be a consortium of companies invested in using the runtime, sort of like opentofu recently.
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!
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.
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).
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?
But also US anti-trust laws at the federal level have always relied on a strong FCC, FTC, and US Attorney General's Office to execute, all of which are currently neutered and/or understaffed under the current administration (and may take years to recover even in the best case scenarios). The US has decided it is a season for trusts and monopolies.
(See the mergers of Paramount and WB into Skydance consolidating 200+ combined years of movie history into a single monopoly under the Oracle nepobaby and almost directly undoing/mocking one of the largest and oldest anti-trust cases which was US v. Paramount Studios which set precedents for how large a movie studio could grow that lasted almost 100 years.)
(There might be something the state of California could do, but I don't know how much they want to get involved.)
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.
But the current issue is right now streaming services dwarf theaters today. The Paramount decree was officially suspended by this administration and its courts on this matter stating it isn't a monopolistic oversight for studios to own and entirely control their streaming services (despite doing the exact same things with "originals" and "exclusives" that led to the original Paramount decree). This administration and its courts not only said the current streaming situation is fine, but that it also means the original Paramount decree no longer applies and studios may own theater chains again, because theaters now compete with streaming.
Skydance having both Paramount+ and HBO Max gives them a huge amount of leverage in the streaming space that is going to get stranger with this consolidation, and gets back to why that 200+ years of combined film history is important and relevant.
IMHO, it shouldn't be allowed.
I think if Cloudflare and Google merged, it still wouldn't be a monopoly because of AWS (and many others).
They got scrutiny over it, sure. But trouble? No, I would say that they did not get into trouble.
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.
I understand why it looks that way, and we knew it would be hard to combat this perception.
But it's simply not true.
The actual story is simply this: The Deno team made a strategic decision to refocus on celld, and we (Cloudflare) are excited to support this work, for the reasons I explained in the blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/
See Ryan's own comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50023277
I'm sure they'll have a migration path to the cloudflare platform in 12 month.
From what is likely going to happen is that Deno will be donated to the Linux Foundation to avoid this.
I hope workerd at least adopts Deno's security mechanisms so it functions as a better sandbox.
One of my favourite projects of 2026 was a configurable LLM harness built around using deno as the runtime. The idea is that the configuration builds a state machine-driven program which is bundled into a binary that can only provide access to the I/O your code explicitly needs. I used it primarily to build interactive programs for colleagues which allow some LLM magic to occur without needing to worry about what they would do with Claude Desktop handling the same data or accessing the same machines and so on. It also allowed for testing local LLMs in deterministic patterns. How do they reason about what to do next when they can evaluate the possible states they can enter, based on the current context? It was really fun. Now I don't really know how I'd rebuild it, knowing I wouldn't use Deno. Maybe that's worth learning anyway.
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.
The moment they took on VC funding they had to care about competitors and also had to move away from the framework to things like Deno Deploy in pursuit of money.
Jt is interesting to speculate on what might have been had Deno never been a profit-seeking company. But having worked there, I am reasonably confident in my assessment above.
A compatibility shim sounds like a great community run project while the core team could work on the slow-but-steady w/o concerning the core with too much burden of node compat.
Deno is now a feedstock for future JS runtimes.
- typescript support - built in linting - built in package manager command - built in transpiler/bundler
In the case of the latter, I'm wondering why. Most of cloudflares architecture like workers support js runtimes so wouldnt investment into deno be more strategic than other priorities
I guess this is why so much core staff left suddenly some months ago.
- 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?
GitHub -> Microsoft, or is this too old
replit is NOT aquired.
- Marimo -> CoreWeave
- Continue -> Cursor (xAI)
Yes open source tooling is gulped by AI companies.
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.
> "Lock-in" actually hurts us — that's why we went open source If there were truly no escape hatch from Workers, then some of our largest customers would never have signed on with us in the first place.
> [...]
> Ryan and Bert will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model. This will involve merging code and ideas from celld back into workerd. I'm incredibly excited for this work — I will personally be using it to host an instance of Cloudflare OS in my home.
If you live in Elixir land, there's this repo from the Phoenix team, which is quite good. It has pluggable storage, and EKV (https://github.com/chrismccord/ekv) is supported as "batteries include" type storage adapter.
https://github.com/elyase/awesome-object-storage-native#stat...
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 think people are focusing on it because if you've built your business on Deno, then the "Deno will have no support in 13 months time" is a bit of an existential risk, and will be a huge time-sink for your team. So it's far more interesting to most of the people reading this page on HN, because HN is full of people who are first-adopters.
https://github.com/elyase/awesome-object-storage-native#stat...
Things don’t always shake out as you plan
- there are companies offering serverless functions on their platforms, powered by Deno Deploy. Can this acquisition be an attempt to kill competition?
- Cloudflare now owns a huge chunck of JavaScript ecosystem, like Vercel. They are buying like countries that are arming themselves for war. What is the strategy here?
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?
