I wonder to what extent this is due to competition from Deno (& Deno Deploy). Deno Deploy is new and probably haves less users than Cloudflare by a wide margin, but (before this announcement) I would prefer to use Deno Deploy or Fly.io instead of Cloudflare Workers.

Deno follows the same philosophy as Cloudflare Workers - it’s a web compatible, secure-by-default V8 runtime for server code. But instead of only running on Cloudflare’s service, Deno can run anywhere and has a growing ecosystem of modules ready to use, including a NodeJS compatibility shim. You can even emit NPM modules from Deno code using a build step. Because Deno is open, companies like Slack have adopted it as part of their first-party APIs (https://slack.com/blog/developers/faster-simpler-way-build-a...).

I think open sourcing the runtime is a good move from Cloudflare, but even as open source, will they be able to build an ecosystem to rival Deno over the long run? Their big moat/lock-in is still the rest of Cloudflare’s APIs - but with an open local dev environment perhaps it’s easier to convince someone like me to use https://denoflare.dev/ and have the best of both worlds.