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Comment by 0xfffafaCrash | Hacker News Reader

I’m not familiar with the author but something about this post just seems mean-spirited and petty.

Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than not.

Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those who have apparently left or been let go have been major contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for your work — we’re better off for your contributions.

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Isn't it reasonable bitterness? He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out, and there's probably a lot of people in that community. Leadership comes with responsibility and consequences.

Content marketed at wannabe startup founders tends to be encouraging and panglossian. It's good to see here what you're signing up for if you succeed with some degree of traction.

> He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out

Whose fault is that?

So just don’t trust people or organizations? Like sure it’s the author’s fault in a sense but should they have just not trusted in the first place?

> He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out

So did the people who built Deno

Has any competitor copied anything from Deno?

Deno basically popularized the idea of a standalone JS runtime that primarily relies on standard Web APIs over "in-house" APIs like Node, although we can say that those standard APIs didn't exist yet when Node was created and for most of its rising period.

Not only that, but they helped push for new web APIs and language features for server runtimes, like URLPattern

I always thought Deno was more or less trying to copy the Cloudflare (edge) runtime, but decided incompatibility was a good idea. The ecosystem bifurcation was the mistake, which they came around on, but it was already too late by then.

I think it’s fair to say that work on the experimental-strip-types option in Node was inspired/energized by a desire to try to catch up with the DX improvements found in Deno for Typescript-first development that is now the norm.

I don't think I'd go as far as "copying" but Deno was the first to aggressively push for web standards in server-side runtimes and certainly helped accelerate getting them adopted in that environment.

I work at Cloudflare on Workers (but infrequently work on our runtime) and I've always been pretty impressed with Deno. Their recent-ish support for built-in OpenTelemetry is something we've been wanting to do for a while and have been working on, but Deno was able to build a good implementation of that in that time.

Cloudflare Workers was actually pushing for web standards on the server side several months before Deno was announced. :)

Though Ryan of course had a lot more clout from day 1 than I did.

(I love cloudflare workers and thanks for that), but I do think that credit is where its due and Deno's push for server side web standards also helped the general ecosystem.

Bun, competition?

Zig is yet to be 1.0, and who knows what anthropic will make out of it.

They can even pivot yet again back into node, as most acquisitions go.

In the mindshare, certainly.

Bun to Deno is what Zig i to Rust: a much simpler, much easier way to overcome its common predecessor's shortcomings. Not nearly as thoroughly and revolutionarily, but still.

What matters is business users.

You know any services as big as X or Claude Code built with Deno?

AFAIK the biggest users of Deno are using their subhosting service (Netlify, Slack, etc) to allow third parties to execute TS code.

No, nor do I care, node is all that matters, long term.

Eventually like it usually happens, it will get the most relevant features and that is about it.

In the State of JS from last year Bun had a 21% market share.

https://2025.stateofjs.com/en-US/other-tools/#runtimes

Double from Deno even though it released years earlier.

I'm sure Node will remain the top runtime for years to come... but not paying attention to what Bun is doing is like burying your head in the sand.

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