Deno is joining Cloudflare
The entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare to combine their work with the Workers and Durable Objects teams, aiming to make a distributed programming model the default for building servers. The Deno runtime will receive monthly bug fixes and security updates for one year, after which development ends; Deno Deploy will shut down in six months with migration support for paying customers; JSR moves to Cloudflare infrastructure. The team sees Durable Objects as key for AI agent harnesses.
We’ve decided to put our future development work into this shared platform rather than continuing to develop a separate runtime and hosting service.
- theodorejb
> 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.
- sholladay
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.
- coldtea
"Deno development effectively shut down via a Cloudflare acquihire" would be a better headline.
- sixdimensional
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?
- networked
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.
- ryanrasti
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.
- bennett_dev
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.
- flohofwoe
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?
- greeniskool
I wonder how this will affect Bunny's competitor to Cloudflare Workers, Edge Scripting [1] -- which runs on Deno.
- TheRoque
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.