Deno Is Joining Cloudflare(deno.com) |
Deno Is Joining Cloudflare(deno.com) |
Extremely disappointing...
> Deno people probably just want a paycheck after they spent years seeking glory and money on something that other people used but didn't pay them a cent for.
My take: Opensource-Infrastructure-as-startup-but-also-charity is a thing that is going to die along with ZIRP. I don't know why VCs ever sniffed around things like this in the first place. The younger generation that followed this business model with liberal "take my stuff" licenses and sneered at GPL etc are learning the hard way that making a nice cool thing and getting noticed is not going to earn you a good living. (And other people will make millions off your passionate work.)
[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...
They would rather have Deno pursue an acquisition instead of shutting down and losing their investment.
The only questionable detail about this announcement is it was for an undisclosed amount. Make of that what you will.
So Deno is going to be unsupported and will no longer be maintained and will be discontinued.
It looks like "written in Rust" is not enough for a selling point and lost out to the fierce competition against Bun.
Though nodejs was even then quite solid in it's position, so maybe it would not have made a difference.
My point is, even if Bun stayed on Zig, Deno still struggled to compete regardless of the language used.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/
TL;DR: Ryan and co. will be merging celld with workerd to create one first-class open source self-hostable runtime for Workers and Durable Objects. In the post I explain in the post why, contrary to what you might think, this is good business for Cloudflare and we're very excited about it.
But I do have a strangely high trust in the individuals involved (you, Ryan, Sunil, others), even though I am a bit perplexed by CloudFlare's incentives or economics
Which is to say: I am choosing to be optimistic :)
Caveat, am commenting before reading, mind you -- just my general reaction to mergers in a world that never cleaves :)
EDIT: though this has also probably deflated a lot of the good-faith conversations I was having with gov-adjacent Europeans about celld being a boon for the moment of heightened European sovereignty, where EU data residency isn't necessarily considered enough distance anymore.
Most of us are here because we’re curious what it means for Deno specifically and FOSS TypeScript runtimes in general, since Bun was also acquired.
Given it's server focus though, I'd be very surprised if it was as good as Deno for giving agents a local code sandbox.
I mean that's just not how it works, most VC investments go to zero and they know that.
So unless someone else picks up development, Deno will no longer be supported.
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?
They should hire a few devs to develop it then.
Then I read that paragraph, and it made more sense that they're acquihiring + killing.
From what is likely going to happen is that Deno will be donated to the Linux Foundation to avoid this.
Things don’t always shake out as you plan
of course i’m only talking about deno, the technology not deno, the cloud service.
Bad news, sorry, the article says:
> 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.
Sounds like Celld will live on within workerd, Deno is over.
From TFA: 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.
will they continue that work ?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977056
otherwise this is a proper acquisition. t
Finally, the next step of forking Node is up for grabs:
Node > Deno > Done (anyone?)
I also wish they expanded jurisdiction more. I worked at companies that couldn't use Cloudflare because of specific location requirements in contracts
If they bought Neon that'd be a coup.
edit: my reaction was too soon, it seems like they will be explicitly working on making workerd an open source self hostable runtime
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.
You should choose Node.js unless you have a good reason to use something else. This is what everyone uses, and it is used widely enough that it's in the same position as Java, i.e. it will be supported forever.
Also the other runtimes only offer incremental improvements.
Regarding the blogposts, you don't read a lot about Node.js because it is mature software and there isn't a lot of drama or new things to talk about.
Deno was never going to be a thing anyways.
Especially with LLMs automating all sorts of code and operational aspects, we could do Tcl/Lua type whitelist sandboxes where the application can only call a limited set of functions.
CF has its own quirky serverless technology and has no interest in funding any competition, even/especially in such sad shape as Deno is
They don't even need to be the long term stewards either. Spend some time setting up a proper governance structure for Deno, hand it off, and then pay some maintainers to continue their existing effort.
At least how it's stated in the post, it really feels like an "ah good luck everyone, I'm out!" sorta deal, which seriously sucks for everyone who really believed in Deno.
Ultimately I only trust Node.js to succeed. Bun being too deep into "shipping anything that increases usage".
I guess I can say that this means Deno won't ever have a much needed Python 3 moment.
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.
This is actually a good decision though.
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
It's an acquihire. They hired the people behind Deno
I'm sure they'll have a migration path to the cloudflare platform in 12 month.
Deno/Bun see the picture better than I do, and they decided it was the right time for an acquihire.