Cloudflare acquires Deno | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare acquires Deno

deno.com

1,112 pointsilreb574 comments

> 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.

This is a wild detail to just bury at the bottom. So many companies went all-in on Deno in recent years. Some even did major migrations off Node.js. Sucks for them I guess, but that's always the risk in chasing the shiny new thing over sticking to the old and dependable.

If it was truly “so many companies” then they wouldn’t be in this situation… reading between the lines here it’s clear Deno was not a successful project.

Exactly why any company that cares about long term maintenance should stick with Node.js except in cases that justify alternative runtime.

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.)

You can migrate off deno in a single day. It's not a big deal.

I guess "joining" was the key word here. But I'm not particularly surprised now that I see it meant acquihire.

I went all-in with bun. Did I bet wrong?

How will this affect those of us relying on those projects? It's not just those companies but also the customers of those companies.

I wonder how much they have financially contributed to Deno.

Node is old I’ll give you that. Dependable is debatable.

Asking as a non-JS person - what's the cost and effort to switch?

At least open source gives them an opportunity for the community to find a way to support it going forward. But I suppose that's just table stakes these days.

It's why I usually look more closely at the comments here than at the story for stories like this.

I was really surprised that cloudflare was acquiring deno to be honest, I have written about this here before, Deno was always sort of dead to me due to how little they cared for compat of all kinds (nodejs, CJS, backwards). It was refreshing to see bun care a lot about it (well, now its on a different path in other ways).

Then I read that paragraph, and it made more sense that they're acquihiring + killing.

Radical idea here, but maybe those many companies could _fund_ the development of key components of their infrastructure.

I mean, if you have any test suite worth a damn, then this should only cost a few dollars in tokens for the average team and be nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

>So many companies went all-in on Deno in recent years.

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?

Honestly migrating back is trivial now. It just isn't that big of a pain.

> So many companies went all-in on Deno in recent years.

They should hire a few devs to develop it then.

Seems like an extremely risky thing to do. Luckily they can keep maintaining it and improving it if their business is truly dependent on it.

Anybody who has been bitten by the many issue with Yarn over the years can tell you, just stick with stock tools and deal with it.

Well, the license Deno is distributed under explicitly warns you (sorry for all caps):

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.

The yt-dlp project uses Deno as its default and preferred JavaScript runtime when downloading YouTube videos (this replaced their own handwritten JS interpreter). Fortunately yt-dlp also has support for Node and QuickJS as well as deprecated support for Bun, but I don’t think any of those were preferred by the project for various reasons such as portability, security and I think also speed.

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.

So "Deno" isn't joining Cloudflare, Deno is effectively defunkt and its former team is joining Cloudflare.

‘Acquires’ is an interesting word, given they’re hiring people and sunsetting the product. They didn’t buy Deno, they hired the team that built it and that forces them to abandon the project.

Language really means nothing these days…

(Yeah I’m salty, I got all in on Deno a year ago.)

I don't like how that's in the Deno post but gets no mention in the Cloudflare post. Seems like a pretty important detail!

This is just normal open source. The software is provided AS IS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.

As a community we've gotten so used to getting things for free and then getting mad when they go away. That's a fine attitude if it's your hobby dependency, but if you're making $100k off that dependency what did you actually expect?

Why buy it then? The staff?

Oof.

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

this is SO SAD. i've spent months on my deno tui

https://github.com/ubernaut/exotui

https://ubernaut.github.io/exotui/

So they don't want to buy Deno, they want to buy the team to work on something cloudflare specific.

I'm happy that the Deno team found a suitable home. Cloudflare is likely the best place for them to land. I believe they will do great things together. However, I'm a bit concerned that there are very few independent Node.js runtimes: Anthropic acquired Bun, and now Deno will not be developed further.

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)

[1] https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2108559594691690663

[2] https://edgejs.org/

Funny that with Bun being acquired by Anthropic, if this big bet on AI doesn't work out we'll end up right back where we started; Node. Obviously Deno will still be OSS, Bun would likely end up that way too, but you get the idea

This is the real headline... and more so that it has been hidden away.

What is in this for Cloudflare? Just the employees? I can't imagine hiring these days is that hard that it's worth creating this much ill will.

Why would they acquire them then shut it down? Is there a reason for that?

The CloudFlare blog concludes with:

"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.

The fate of many forks, while reference implementation keeps chugging along adopting the most relevant features.

What's the business logic behind buying and sunsetting?

Genuine question, is this legal under US anti-monipoly laws?

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?

Damn that sucks. I love Deno. It really should have ‘won’ the runtime race. Oh well.

Thats really upsetting ngl.

Interesting. I guess open source is not as dependable as it used to be

I missed this when I skimmed the post. Sad stuff. I'm a big fan of deno.

i guess bun won

Hmm ... so why would they acquire it to let it die?

Fuck me! We’re going to have to start our migration as soon as possible. I knew we were in a precarious spot after the layoffs, but this is a truly sad outcome.

I'm saddened by this, and will now need to plan for some migration work in a couple of production projects. Sigh.

Shame- it is my favorite Markdown formatter.

I mean we already have a winner (Bun) and it just means that Deno has admitted defeat.

From what is likely going to happen is that Deno will be donated to the Linux Foundation to avoid this.

Kinda feels like a rug pull, similar to Bun.

Which any existing user can just do?

I'm so bummed about this. Deno is by far my favourite JS runtime. I could sense this coming for a while now, but I was hopeful and just waiting to see what happened. Here we are. I'm glad I don't need to get off the runtime immediately. Sad we won't see any innovation like we did in the last 8 years or so.

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.

For what it's worth, workerd has some pretty aggressive sandboxing too. I'm a bit biased but ask your favorite LLM about it.

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.

Bun's adoption rate (because of its NPM compatibility) was the forcing function; not VC funding. Deno could pursue a slow-and-steady better-will-win approach vs. Node until another runtime competitor appeared with a more seamless node integration. In fact, the VC funding is what made the slow-but-steady strategy possible in the first place.

Strong disagree. Deno could have been a cheaply run open source project with corporate sponsors and could have pursued the slow and steady approach. There's no reason to feel pressure from competitors unless you want to if you're forging a genuinely new path. "Clean break from Node" was the differentiator. Once they abandoned that the reason for using it went away.

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.

They basically gave up the day they decided to become npm compatible. That was the day Deno died.

That’s the day I switched to Bun

Enshittification is inevitable once a company takes VC funding

That's the correct answer, the rest is cope.

"Deno development effectively shut down via a Cloudflare acquihire" would be a better headline.

I'm trying to understand this. Cloudflare wants the people to work on different priorities or cloudflare wants deno to die?

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'm more thinking of "Deno (the company) lost interest/faith in Deno (the runtime), so they were looking for an out". They like working with runtimes, so Cloudflare is probably a good choice.

I guess this is why so much core staff left suddenly some months ago.

It’s likely that this could be true but they simply have something else they want the acquihired to work on and feel Deno would be a distraction. At least they’re being honest with it instead of letting development stall and all the ill will that comes with the usual slow death by acquisition

Brilliant take, this is why I come here. Cut through the "our amazing journey" BS.

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?

Shopify bought Remix and Tailwind and hired the maintainer of Preact

Didn't we use to say that the startup exit strategy was to sell to Yahoo. I guess now a days it is sell to AI

Scala -> Vertiseit AB this year, I was going to joke about someone acquiring Scala but found out it really happened

GitHub -> Microsoft, or is this too old

Svelte -> Vercel

- Warp -> OpenAI

replit is NOT aquired.

- Marimo -> CoreWeave

- Continue -> Cursor (xAI)

Yes open source tooling is gulped by AI companies.

EdgeDB -> Vercel

Dioxus -> Cognition

BetterAuth -> Vercel

TanStack next?

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.

From the Cloudflare blog post, this quote from Kenton Varda (head of Workers):

> "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.

Love the transition from being secure on my machine to being secure on somebody else's machine. This offers additional security by making it impossible for me to move the code anywhere else. Which solves the common security problem of me moving my business anywhere else.

To kill celld and potential competitor early? AFAIK, there is no a single Durable Objects alternative at the moment? It's better that way I guess.

> there is no a single Durable Objects alternative at the moment

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/phoenixframework/durable_server

There is rivet and terse

https://github.com/elyase/awesome-object-storage-native#stat...

Celld seems great, did not even know!

Meaning better that there is no alternative?

Rivet

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.

The plan is to bring the celld model to workerd: run a fleet of workerd instances that use a bucket for coordination and storage. Building on workerd, instead of a separate runtime means our effort isn't split and that APIs are exactly the same in both CF and self-hosted. And of course the deno team will help improve the worker runtime itself.

>A lot of the comments are on sunsetting Deno, but the more interesting part is merging the celld model 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.

check rivet and terse

https://github.com/elyase/awesome-object-storage-native#stat...

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.

Don’t have a strong opinion on any of this, but it’s actually super normal for anyone who helps run a business to push hard and try to grow it.

Things don’t always shake out as you plan

Investors are a helluva drug

Yeah they just made me migrate my blog to their new cloud platform four months ago.

That's a pretty uncharitable take. It literally only exists because of him, he pushed hard for it for years, and now he's decided not to anymore it leaves a bitter taste? What do you want him to do?

Meh, those types of large scale migrations are just a very short prompt nowadays.

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?

if you're not locked to javascript you could use python with pep-723[1] to declare inline dependencies

1: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

`zx --install` will give you this. It's quite handy and enjoyable generally for shell scripting in ts/js. https://google.github.io/zx/cli#install

Deno should never have been a business - there's no business model.

And worse for Deno - nodejs may not be great but it's good enough.

And may you never have an incumbent competitor that is is "good enough" - it will be your downfall.

The Cloudflare side is also worth a read: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/

I’m happy if this means Deno is able to get a second impulse. I use Deno daily and while it’s true that it’s in this weird position where it’s not sexy like bun or enterprise-y like node, it has a great developer experience. a no-surprises runtime that does a lot of interesting things the right way (like compile to desktop to a browser-less webgpu runtime), the vscode extension is flawless and overall the perfect balance of batteries included without bloat.

of course i’m only talking about deno, the technology not deno, the cloud service.

> I’m happy if this means Deno is able to get a second impulse

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.

> I’m happy if this means Deno is able to get a second impulse.

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.

read the blogpost, they are discontinuing deno after 1 year

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.

8 years is not super old, or even old. It's important to understand software maturity cycles for core components.

> I don't even remember "the bad parts" that Deno tries to solve, were they that bad at all ?

Well node and bun sought to solve the same problems after Deno demonstrated a path. They got to learn from Deno's mistakes as well.

To me Deno died the day it decided to not support npm packages and died again when it started supporting it.

Ironically the reason why I hated it when it was introduced was the reason why they added support for npm (i.e. absolute URLs don't support semver and therefore you will load multiple versions)

If Deno just took payments or at least donations, it would have thousands, or even tens of thousands of paying customers. Instead, they preferred to submit to VC and chase beehives on Deno Deploy territory.

Deno Deploy offering would have never be profitable because it contradicted the very core of the Deno's technology promise: absence of lock-in and freedom to self-host.

Insane, I'm deeply saddened and embittered, I don't want to go back to NodeJS and I don't find any advantage in Bun. I guess this is my sign to just get off of JavaScript entirely.

Whatever allows you to make stuff is good enough.

What's wrong with NodeJS or Bun?

Very unfortunate. I’ve been using Deno for years and recently embedding the runtime into applications/platforms for agents. I’ll continue to use it and hope a community springs up.

I believe so. Deno is too good to just die off.

Congrats on the exit :)

Finally, the next step of forking Node is up for grabs:

Node > Deno > Done (anyone?)

Oned maybe.

And then Danone.

The first thing I look at the next time I look at a project like Deno would be its governance structure and if it can be bought by a large company. Imagine if what happened here (or MySQL) happens to Postgres!

I think the biggest thing Cloudflare needs to buy is some sort of Postgres-database service. They've already cornered the market for everything front-end/serverless

Cloudflare could make the biggest impact by doing something similar to AWS DSQL. There are very few options in the multi-region replicated space, and it ties in nicely with their edge workers.

D1 is their bet there but considering hyperdrive, a real Postgres would be cool.

I also wish they expanded jurisdiction more. I worked at companies that couldn't use Cloudflare because of specific location requirements in contracts

Yeah. D1 is nice and easy but a serverless postgres offering would make a significant difference.

Planetscale?

This might not be seen in much favourable light by many but IMO Cloudflare has the most elegant serveless PaaS as I have seen to date.

The design and architecture is extremely minimal to the point that all of it can be explained on a single A4 page with a 14pt font including D1 + Durable objects. And I hope that it stays that way.

It has all the primitives that you can wish for to build a software system on top of it be it queues, long running jobs, workflows, pipelines, email handlers, cron jobs and even built in AI models ready for you to be invoked.

ATM - it is extremely cheap, reliable, simpler and more capable than anything out there. Deno itself had very little scope anyway because almost no developer tooling is sellable in this environment even more so post AI. Therefore, it is going to accelerate the Cloudflare platform to be the best in class and hopefully not complex and bloated.

I wonder how this will affect Bunny's competitor to Cloudflare Workers, Edge Scripting [1] -- which runs on Deno.

[1] https://bunny.net/docs/scripting/

I'm very surprised they are not running with the runtime. That seemed like Deno's secret sauce? The rest of it is very aligned with Cloudflare already, deploy, kv, workers, etc seems like the lower hanging fruit.

It's almost certainly not worth it. Having less software that you can keep more reliable is almost always worth it over having more software just because it's 10% faster or whatever. This isn't always true but it's mostly true.

I'm very sad Deno is going away, even though I've never used it nor did I plan to use it.

It is a bit hypocritical in a sense. Similar to how I was sad that a local restaurant recently closed down. In the past two years I went there maybe three times total. But I just liked having it there as an option.

Deno had a ton of good ideas but I just never felt confident that it would have the lasting power. Some of the early decisions, like their initial refusal to fully support package.json and the npm eco-system, made me unsure of their suitability as the basis for a business.

But I always wanted them to succeed. In the same way I always wanted Heroku to succeed even though I never used their service.

More options are better. But I guess "use it or lose it" applies. Did I dodge a bullet or contribute to the downfall?

Even if official development ends next year, the pressure Deno put on Node to modernize TypeScript support and standards was worth it

RIP Deno. Goes into the bin, after Bun.

Didn’t they have a flashy lawsuit to free the JavaScript trademark? What happens to that now?

No indication cloudflare would pursue that yet that I see.

It looks like, after Oracle kept on pushing out the deadline for a certain step in the suit process, the parties are in settlement negotiations now [0]; the motion was granted [1], so we might see more info after October 28th.

[0] https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=92086835&pty=CAN&eno... [1] https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=92086835&pty=CAN&eno...

Pretty sure that was just for marketing.

Big acquisition, but I hope Deno's runtime doesn't get slowly tied to Cloudflare's specific Workers primitive instead of staying standard platform-agnostic.

I was rooting for Deno so much as I was fighting with node for years. Luckily I made full transition from JS last year and not comming back.

What did you transition to?

Node always felt so annoying to deal with. I was really excited when Bun and Deno were coming up. Pour one out.

We’re in an interesting time for developer tooling. It’s easier than it’s ever been to develop new tools, but harder to monetize or maintain them. We need to figure out what sustainable OSS looks like in the AI age.

All of this just re-informed my believe to stay with true and tested systems that have survived decades. C if I fell confident and Common Lisp otherwise. Both standardized, have been around for ages, and they don’t disappoint.

I feel bad for anyone that now relies on Deno. And as good as Cloudflare might be for some things, I also feel bad for anyone relying on them.

This is a real bummer. Work never adopted Deno but I love their model, security posture, and the standard library. I've been less interested in typescript recently, but it has turned into the default for frontend.

On the plus side, cloudflare will get access to some fantastic talent, who can hopefully put their effort into building a better web.

This shows that there was no money to be made in their business model and they had to sell to make up for the years or losses accumulated.

Does anyone know how many paying Deploy customers there were? The post only offers migration help to paying customers and gives them six months, which makes me think the number is small enough to hand-hold. Millions of runtime downloads and a few hundred accounts on a paid plan can both be true, and only the second one pays for a team.

Last year it was bun, and now it is - Deno!

What's happening to JS platforms? I thought Deno has a much better approach to building a platform.

> What's happening to JS platforms?

They took on VC funding.

People need to eat and pay rent. Can’t survive on just goodwill.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

It seems VC money is not really compatible with open source

Maybe they all learned their lesson from Docker giving away the entire product for free

I hope so. So far it mostly killed projects.

What happens to Supabase?

Remember "choose boring technology"?

I had to evaluate Deno vs. Bun vs. Node for a project two years ago, and chose Node. I think Deno has good ideas but often times these projects cannot reach escape velocity, especially when they're constrained by VC motives.

It's very sad. I was excited about Deno from day one, and I wanted to see it succeed.

Deno's ability to run TypeScript files - stripping types - was arguably implemented in Node because of Deno. The consolidated tooling approach was a good attempt at solving tooling fragmentation that Node suffers from.

I think for Deno to succeed, it would've had to have been under a non-profit and maybe that can still happen.

It would certainly be nice if someone continued the work. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for it. Seems like an unthankful job (although I’m sure many projects using Demo now would be happy if it’s still supported, at least).

Genuine question. Why are companies buying our runtimes ? What is the advantage ? Maintaining open source and having more adoption in specific softwares like runtimes and programming languages helps keep software more robust and reliable right ? Am I getting something wrong.

In this specific case, it's probably just aqui-hiring. There's a ton of incredible talent at Deno and Cloudflare can pay them a lot more

Also Deno was starting to try to increase revenue with stuff like Deno Deploy. If Deno did succeed, they would be a direct competitor with Cloudflare Workers

With Bun I think it was basically a marketing ploy. To show that it can be developed by AI and still useful

In this case, they're explicitly not buying the runtime. They're killing the runtime.

A bit worried what will become of https://github.com/denoland/rusty_v8 as it still is the best maintained (?) and featured binding of V8 for rust.

rusty_v8 isn't going anywhere - we'll keep maintaining it and will be working towards integrating it into workerd

I wouldn’t have imagined cloudflare acquiring Deno. But AI got into both of them and somehow now it makes sense? It’s wild. Anyhow congrats to Deno team.

Really sad to see this. I've built projects on the Deno runtime and to see it end in 45 words...

I guess the positive is that at least Deno pushed Node.js to evolve.

Please be sure to read the post on Cloudflare's blog, it's not just fluff:

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.

I do appreciate that it's not explicitly anti-competitive, but as a biochemist who spent a lot of time thinking about living systems, I am a bit concerned about a budding ecology that has perhaps collapsed <3

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.

Who decided that the Deno runtime would be abandoned? Was this Cloudflare's or Deno's decision? And why?

I don’t know that many people reading this particular thread care whether this is a good business decision for Cloudflare.

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.

I was a big fan of deno, so much that I migrated all my cf worker to demo, cause you can run the same engine in there cloud and local/selfhost - perfect no vender lockin(like with cloud flare workers), it's so sad to see it gets shelved.

If this was done to kill celld as a runtime that would be unfortunate.

edit: my reaction was too soon, it seems like they will be explicitly working on making workerd an open source self hostable runtime

On the contrary. Please read my part of Cloudflare's blog post here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/

Sounds like the opposite: They are killing Deno to work on celld

I still remember this cute drawing from years ago outlining the things Ryan regret about Node

https://imgur.com/a/XFAMzOV

Man the "cute girly sketchbook doodle summarizing a programming thing" is a throwback to a bygone era. I saw that and immediately knew "this is from the late 2010s"

I remember early into my first programming job as an intern in 2017 someone shared a very similar looking series of sketches intended to explain git with cats. I didn't understand it at the time, and then years later when I was much more comfortable with git I took a look at it again and the explanations make just as little sense to me now as it did then.

Deno did bring lot of good ideas and hope some of them will flow into Node, especially full typescript type stripping, package less imports to name a few.

Also worth calling out that if you want to disrupt a major player, you need to be 10x better, not just 2x.

Either way, congrats team. Hope you going on to build something great at Cloudflare.

I'll sound smug saying it but this is always, always inevitable from the moment Deno took VC investment. Either it was going to be successful enough to take over everything (and it wasn't going to be) or it would end up acquired/shut down.

I know Node is boring but it's not going anywhere.

So is dead for all intents and purposes. And this would’ve happened to Bun if it hadn’t found its killer app (Claude Code).

Another reason why standards matter. Think twice before you bet on that VC funded horse, folks.

I have no idea anymore what is happening, and none of the blogposts seem to explain that either. So, if I am to start a new JS or TypeScript project or whatever, what should I choose and why? One runtime used a lot of tokens to rewrite Zig project, one was already Rust, one bought, one rewritten in Go, what is going on?

> what should I choose and why?

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.

One was not rewritten in Go. Typescript rewrote its compiler in Go, but that doesn't affect which runtime you use for the resulting Javascript code. Moreover this isn't producing a fork in Typescript as it is a replacement for the previous compiler, at least once they're done with it. The JS runtime forks and churn are not related to Typescript per se.

There's basically no reason not to just go with Node as 99% of projects out there do

I don't choose TS/JS for new projects anymore unless they're browser based. If you need to be in JS land for whatever reason, deploy with Node but do local package management/testing with Bun, because it's way faster for those and you can migrate off without too much pain if it ever becomes problematic.

There's just one worthy of using for fresh project: Bun.

Deno was never going to be a thing anyways.

> So, if I am to start a new JS or TypeScript project or whatever, what should I choose and why?

NodeJS for the runtime if it's not in a browser, webpack for bundling. For the frontend stack, either React if you're in for a full application or, fuck it, good old jQuery if you don't want to do type document.queryXXX all the time. You'll find a ton of developers and coding bootcamp graduates to deal with all of that, and the AI agents should all be trained well enough on them.

Everything else is just a recipe for getting rug-pulled or being the bananaware customer responsible for the ripening.

I'd just go with Node, it supports TS natively now.

If your company does not own an ecmascript runtime ngmi

I just learned of Deno yesterday when setting up some software for the first time. I wonder how many applications depend on it behind the scenes?

Curious to see whether, in five or so years, we'll see another talk by Ryan Dahl announcing a new JS runtime: doen!

this makes me so angry. I've literally spent months working on my tui. I hope to god deno keeps going.

https://github.com/ubernaut/exotui

https://ubernaut.github.io/exotui/

I’ve been using Deno’s permission system as a sandboxed replacement for ‘python -c’ for my agents. Hopefully a better supported runtime (in any language) adds a similar permissions system in the near future.

I have 2 questions:

- 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?

Well this is fucking depressing.

So what's the story with JSR sticking around then? Does it already see meaningful use among people using Workers, or do they just really want an escape hatch in case we see more long-term issues with GitHub and NPM?

And does it at least mean the stdlib will see continued development?

It probably does get that advantage that it has had fewer supply chain attacks than npm.

I liked its scoring system for packages and "make the Typescript docs a public part of the package page" and "focus entirely on ESM-first/ESM-only packages". None of that npm does today, so JSR is still the best way I know to find modern and up-to-date/clean packages versus npm just has a nasty swamp of things still in CommonJS for no reason or that will never get upgraded out of CommonJS because the original maintainers are long gone.

JSR keeps running - the infrastructure is moving to CF

Inevitable for a project like this when you take VC money, unfortunately.

This is sad. I was a heavy user of Deno, though I recognized its likely downfall when they laid off a large part of their team in the last year.

Well this sucks. My blog is based on deno as I wasn't a fan of node.js at the time. I guess I'm gonna have to rewrite my blog engine.

What is it with everyone buying runtimes? — P.S. Deno always felt like it is going to be abandoned, you can't build your work on this much shaky ground...

Well this is very stupid. Why not move Deno to be based on workerd or something? or vice versa? throwing it away is such a waste.

Wow, so React Native and Deno both effectively have nails in their coffins. I wonder what's next.

What happened to React Native? Is it going to be discontinued as well?? We have quite a few customers using it, so we provide a SDK for it. Could be interesting if we can retire that.

"entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare .."

Whom did they work for before?

This is mostly to be expected.

After Deno did layoffs we saw a consistent decline in announcements and innovation.

Sad day, but unsurprising.

Does Cloudflare already use Deno under the hood then? Like the Anthropic -> Bun aquisition

Does this mean that celld is dead? No more open source durable objects?

Wow. Just about to choose Deno for something. That not only makes me rethink Deno but ... rethink a lot of things ...

my recent comment [0]: was deno was the only other tech player building a proper serverless platform to bring Cloudflare workers in an open source manner.

will they continue that work ?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977056

otherwise this is a proper acquisition. t

the CF blog post suggests that is what the Deno team will be working on: combining workerd and celld for true self hostable workers/DOs

This is actually awesome news believe it or not. I'm excited b/c i think there's a lot of potential in the world w/ deno's team being on solid footing w/ cloudflare.

I know the runtime is in trouble, but i'm not as worried tbh b/c the principles deno championed are going to keep going.

What ? They are literally stopping development in a year.

You think the open source community will be able to continue deno? Did you miss the part where they're stopping development on it?

Can we rename title to "Deno is winding down" ? It's not joining cloudflare. the people are

what’s so great about it?

No idea why CF wouldn't just have them to continue working on Deno indefinitely...

Because Deno turned into some quirky serverless technology.

CF has its own quirky serverless technology and has no interest in funding any competition, even/especially in such sad shape as Deno is

> 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.

Extremely disappointing...

10 things I regret about Deno talk incoming

It's only OpenAI which doesn't have an in-house modern runtime

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/

They should just go all in with Wasm.

~/.local/bin/codex --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox -c 'model="internal-gpt-7-turbo-blackhole"' -c 'model_reasoning_effort="max"' -c 'plan_mode_reasoning_effort="max"'

create a plan to implement a javascript runtime similar to {deno,bun,node.js,whatever} in {Rust,C++,ASM,Go,Fortran} language, use subagents @ max effort, keep building until you're done, follow instructions according to INSTRUCTIONS.md

Wait a day and you're done.

Fools... I downloaded it for free...

anthropic + bun vs cloudflare + deno, could it be counter move for building from agent sandbox that runs on the edge?

I still find it breathtaking that anybody ever thought it was a good idea to develop a web server in a single-threaded language. And apparently huge numbers of people still do.

Cloudflare really be buying up everything

never used deno or paid much attention to it despite all the fancy marketing.

i always wondered how they were making money

Grats on the bag.

Disappointing news to see it shut down, but maybe the writing was on the wall after they laid off some of their folks.

I've been using deno for years and built some nontrivial services in it. When deno added support for npm packages, the early days were pretty rough. I ran into lots of issues with packages and spent a lot of time reading random github issue threads. It's been pretty smooth sailing for the last year or so though.

At least I can use ai to help migrate off of deno.

https://dbushell.com/2026/03/20/denos-decline-and-layoffs/

Gotta say the fate of Deno has been pretty disappointing I had high hopes for it

Can't believe they bought out Vite and now Deno. All our toolchains are getting bought out by military contractors

Congrats to the team! Sad to see deno go away, it’s a really great tool

I’m disappointed that they discontinue the Deno runtime. It really is a joy to use.

I think they ran out of money and joining Cloudflare was their only remaining option.

Deno was a good idea in the Old World of software development before LLMs, and simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

Why? We probably need more sandboxing, not less.

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.

Man, this year has been nothing but bad news for me. This is disappointing, and really makes me question what is the point if even open source is now this easily enshittified or "killed by [insert big tech co here]." I've spent years now using Deno nearly exclusively for new projects, and saw it as the most sane JS server runtime. This also makes me hesitant to use anything with Ryan Dahl's name on it ever again.

This is awesome. The Cloudflare platform is great; being able to run more of it locally is a definite plus.

R.I.P.

Disappointing. Everything I want to express about this is impolite.

I guess I can say that this means Deno won't ever have a much needed Python 3 moment.

is this a good or a bad news ?

really wondering what role celld played in the negotiations

From CloudFlare's side (https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/) is seems celld was the main point of this - letting the Deno team focus on making workerd self-hosting easier.

Damn that is a shame. I liked pretty much everything about Deno. Especially great for scripting.

I'll probably move to Rust for scripting I reckon. It's not very mature but hopefully it won't be too much longer.

Fresh was also the best web framework I've used. Oh well.

Congrats. But also terrible news for the ecosystem; this project was a bit doomed from the start, and they acknowledge it multiple times (implicitly), but nice to have competition, I guess.

Ultimately I only trust Node.js to succeed. Bun being too deep into "shipping anything that increases usage".

Bun is claude code now. Not gonna touch it.

Deno was a nice alternative with easy configuration and I loved KV and running it on a VPS.

sorry, but who even is still working on Deno? All my friends who used to work on Deno got fired

One step towards a $25K github replacement?

Announcing eDon, my rewrite of Deno in Rust!

Edit: Yes, but it's not named after me, which this fork fixes.

It's going to be the first JavaScript runtime to natively support Super Intelligence APIs.

I'm having an LLM replacing all occurrences of "ai" in every API with "si", in the hopes that OpenSI or SpaceXSI will acquihire me.

Deno's already mostly Rust

https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/

> The Deno team is joining Cloudflare to radically simplify self-hosting Workers and Durable Objects so developers can use the same primitives in more places.

Well, that's pretty big news actually.

Cloudflare is playing a big game ...

i guess bun won?

Congrats Ry

Honestly, this motion right here is the death of open source - the rug pull. I no longer can trust any open source project won't get bought up and sunsetted. I'm glad open tofu and valkey and Linux exist to serve as a counter example but this makes me sad.

It's not the death of open source. It will probably be the death of small company open source. Either 100% community/non profit or 100% big corporation and users check corporate alignment with project goals.

Honestly with AI just build it yourself.

I took the plunge and ripped out all my (“open source”) Magento shopfronts and reimplemented them from the ground in…… 2 hours. And it is so much more performant to boot.

RIP

So both major (and the only meaningful) possible Node alternatives have been absorbed into proprietary monoliths in the last year. We all know how well the Joyent years went, RIP to open source innovation at this point.

Node is still there

Holy shit, I used to work on the Workers Runtime Team and I'm surprised!

how about the IP? will the future open source project be DENO or will they have to come up with another permutation.

(I've trademarked ENDO , feel free to DM me for a license)

can yall stop selling out to cloudflare? The continued consolidation of the internet/tech is wild.

Unreal. Another open source project eaten up by the giants of big tech.

huhyyy

is this Cloudflare signalling they're going to hard pivot to being an AI company?

No if that were true they wouldn't be stopping development of Deno, which as it stands sits in the best position for codemode given it's granular sandboxing.

</3

> Deno sells out

I read it more as:

> 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.)

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.

Isn't bun also written in rust, so can you clarify what your point is here?

I'd guess Deno failed because of the original decision of not supporting node_modules, instead went with a different way of handling dependencies. Else the native typescript support would most likely had pushed them to bigger success past nodejs.

Though nodejs was even then quite solid in it's position, so maybe it would not have made a difference.

What a shame. Guess me and the clankers will be maintaining a fork now

Sorry, but even factoring in that this acquisition carries over the existing customer base and goodwill, this is still **** (censored because I aim to stay polite). Deno is factually speaking a one to two week project at this point (proven by the numerous JS runtimes already on the market). I genuinely do not see how this makes any sense whatsoever. If Cloudflare was seeking to hire the team behind Deno they could have done it at a fraction of the price paid. This, naturally, assumes they did pay anything and I can't be bothered to look up the exact $$$ amounts.

I think Deno’s VC money ran out (see the layoffs a few months ago) and Cloudflare offered a stable, well paying job, maybe with stock options.

Just this morning I checked the Deno blog (again like so often in recent weeks) to see if they are still alive. The number of mentions in Hacker News posts and comments was zero in recent weeks. The project was basically dead or abandoned already. Sucks, because I went all-in on Deno.

uh oh

It was pretty naive to stand in front of that NodeJS train.

Welp. All tech eventually gets bought out by military contractors or grows big enough to become one.

So Cloudflare killed Deno

Its no longer gonna be supported after 1 year

In that case Deno is not joining cloudflare, it's got eaten.

I invested a lot and use deno everywhere. Can't trust anything these days.

Lets fork it into opendeno. I like to have an all-in-one swiss army knife tool.

> So Cloudflare killed Deno

Uh no. The lack of users killed Deno.

As a bystander, I'm excited by this. I don't know what it'll be, but I have a sense some interesting, powerful, and secure new ways of shipping code could come from this marriage...

Time and again, staying on the mainstream node/npm stack continues to be the validated choice. I've seen this happen with io.js, bun, and deno. The situation has been similar for yarn/bun and most alternatives on the package manager side.

Of course, that's not to say the work done on these platforms was wasted. The divide around io.js was meaningful to getting things moving faster and change the governance structure. Deno and bun both showcased things Node could be doing better and some of that was folded back in.

And in spite of all those past experiences, I still find myself using pnpm over npm today. I'm sure npm will continue to evolve and eventually the critical features of pnpm will just be part of core npm. But the gap today is massive enough that pnpm over npm feels critical. The disk usage and performance wins are life-changing for daily work and CI flows.

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