How will this affect those of us relying on those projects? It's not just those companies but also the customers of those companies.
The one silver lining here is that Deno had already increased their node/npm compatibility. Migrating off of the jsr ecosystem and back to npm is going to be less painful than one might imagine. I expect present LLMs to be sufficiently good at the task, for example.
- They originally bet on being a TypeScript dialect that didn't quite match the expectations of node in a few small places that ended up mattering hugely.
- One of the original value propositions was "deno compile" and "deno bundle", and those never actually worked well enough to be robust for our real-world use cases (early on they didn't support TLA, then dynamic imports didn't work, then they had issues with ARM compilation)
- Then they simultaneously tried to support node syntax out of the box with npm import specifiers _and_ create a new javascript registry (jsr.io)
- At the point where we expected them to actually make their base-level ecosystem robust, they pivoted to edge compute, and then the writing was on the wall
Server side compiled languages were working perfectly fine, but we had to have this scripting languages, performance doesn't matter 2010's vibe.
Only for all to realise 15 years later that performance actually matters when paying the electricity bill.
JS running on a raspberrypi can support most sites on the internet.
Sure it matters at scale but what tech interviews forget is most don't every get to the scale where it matters.
A 2015 machine with duel xeons can run many many small tech companies stacks.
Deno/Bun see the picture better than I do, and they decided it was the right time for an acquihire.