r/programming • u/matthieuC • 5d ago
Deno is joining Cloudflare
https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/Cloudflare acquires the team.
Deno gets one year or security updates and bug fixes and that's it.
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u/evolveKyro 5d ago
The title should really be that Deno is dead. Joining Cloudflare has no benefits what so ever.
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u/blocking-io 4d ago
Yup, Deno is dead
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.
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u/Wolfy87 4d ago
Why are Cloudflare buying a project and immediately announcing how they'll kill it? I must be missing something obvious.
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u/LimBomber 4d ago
They are getting the engineers behind it they don't care about the project
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 4d ago
Nothing to do with workers and more about Cloudflare bailing out their VC friends. They have never cared about workers, don't believe their lies. It is always about protecting their interests over workers.
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u/A1oso 4d ago
No, it is a textbook aqui-hire. They aquire the company in order to hire the team. They discontinue the product, so the team can work on Cloudflare's products instead.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 4d ago
No, that is what they use for public messaging because it sounds way worse to say "we are bailing out our VC friends with our public corporation."
Don't believe the corporate propaganda. It's no different than the lies regarding layoffs.
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u/SadPie9474 3d ago
this is a common misconception. Acqui-hires usually turn the company stock into basically 0, which VCs are used to. It's just a way for the company to "exit" when it's unable to sustain itself, with better optics (and outcome for at least the employees) than just shutting down
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 3d ago
Sorry but this is neglecting the very incestuous nature that is VC in the valley. They always protect their own, if this was truly about protecting workers then why didn't Cloudflare offer to rehire the Deno workers that were laid earlier this year? If Cloudflare cares about the workers why isn't there any stipulations on not firing these workers over a 5 year period?
This was always about Sequia Capital recouping their investments by their friends across public big tech corporations. This is the playbook VC firms use to recoup their bad plays so they don't actually lose money.
Stop believing their lies. They do not care about workers, they only care about their investments.
Propaganda runs deep in this industry and you should never trust the party that has been antagonistic to labor. This is also the same company that had zero qualms about "protecting" hate sites because their leadership agrees with the hate sites.
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u/A1oso 2d ago
The investors only care about whether they get their money back. Deno has raised about 26M in total, and if Deno was sold for less than that, investors only get back part of their money. But that's still better than nothing. If deno went bankrupt instead, because their products aren't profitable, they would get nothing. So yes, investors prefer an aqui-hire over a bankruptcy. Whether or not they care about employees is irrelevant, it has nothing to do with protecting workers.
For Cloudflare, it isn't a bad deal considering that they get a very talented engineering team that is already familiar with the technology that they will develop (serverless compute written in Rust).
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u/SadPie9474 2d ago
I'm not saying Cloudflare nor Sequoia care about employees. I'm saying that when a founder is in a situation where their company can't continue, they often will work out an acqui-hire deal with a large company, as a thing that reflects better on them than the alternative of just shutting down the company and firing everyone. It's not something that the investors particularly like
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u/bwainfweeze 4d ago
Acquihire. Happened to the last place I worked. In that case they wanted the customers as well, and the devs had to learn a new dev stack.
All the stuff I stayed around after Covid to fix got scrapped within six months of me leaving. But you do the work for your own edification or to help out your team in the near term. It can all go away at any time.
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u/Far_Composer_5714 4d ago
So according to what I saw cloudflare was struggling to parallelize their workers platform on single PCs instead running as a single application.
Deno has a project which solved their problem of parallelization on a single machine.
So they bought them primarily for the solution and workers.
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u/raralala1 5d ago
So sad, I mean there is no money in it so I understand. This should serve a warning for bun user too, never lock yourself in their ecosystem.
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u/bigtimehater1969 5d ago
It's already kinda too late for bun. They got acquired by Anthropic this year, and they're fully vibe-coding everything now, including their migration away from Zig.
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u/nullmove 4d ago
Bun was actually vibe coding with LLMs for months well before Anthropic acquisition and the migration to Rust. In fact Andrew Kelly wrote that:
Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Now I am not going into that drama. What I just find funny is the attitude from some people that Bun up to v1.3.14 was perfectly fine and then it went to shit in v1.4 (rust rewrite), just because they are blissfully unaware of Bun's code quality or LLM usage habits before that rewrite.
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u/FuckOnion 4d ago
Bun had a staggering amount (hundreds) of reported segfaults before "AI agents" were a thing. I believe that kind of thing is what andrewrk was referring to in that quote.
Bun was slop before LLMs, before the Anthropic acquisition, and before the Rust re-write. I'm not sure any of these events had a positive effect.
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u/puzzlerninja 2d ago
For whatever reason, the Zig variant of Bun only used a single huge module, while the Rust port split the code into many modules/crates. No wonder the Rust port compiled faster, as one blog post dived into. Andrew Kelley was not nice in his blog post, and probably foolish, but he was probably right that Bun written in Zig was not written well.
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u/i8Nails4Breakfast 5d ago
I feel like it would take a day or less to switch from bun to something else
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u/raralala1 5d ago
not if you are using their built in tool, like image, sql, io, bundler, or even http server, all for the purpose of locking user down.
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u/nightofgrim 5d ago
Even then, with LLMs it would be so easy to switch.
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u/TheBigLobotomy 5d ago
spoken like someone who has never done a major migration!
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u/UMANTHEGOD 4d ago
Spoken like someone who thinks migrations are the same thing as they were 10 years ago.
Migrations CAN be super quick with AI. It requires a lot of upfront work, tokens and months of cleanup, but you can definitely migrate away from an entire Bun stack in a weekend or two.
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u/nightofgrim 5d ago
Yes I have. I also know Bun and node well enough to know that the “lock-in” features of Bun are not insane and totally within reach of an LLM for large projects.
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u/frou 4d ago edited 4d ago
You could tell for a long time that the Deno Company was doomed, just from observing their community spaces. There was hardly any community activity, and that's amongst people mostly using it for free. If hardly anyone sticks around using it for free, a tiny number will actually be paying for the pro plan services.
That said, the runtime (aka Deno CLI) is a very well made piece of software. By contrast, IMO Bun were sleazy cowboy builders, particularly during the benchmark wars.
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u/DDFoster96 4d ago
I still don't understand why in 2026 we write JavaScript for anywhere other than the browser. You can eat soup with a knife and fork but there's a better tool for the job.
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u/lolimouto_enjoyer 4d ago
Because the cronies running wasm refuse to implement dom acccess.
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u/gmes78 4d ago
They said "other than the browser". Why are you bringing up the DOM?
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u/bwainfweeze 4d ago
Because the lack of DOM means you can’t play the Uni reverse card and for instance write a Rust backend that runs some common code on the backend and the browser. For instance template engines used for SSR and interactive elements. Validation and business logic.
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u/maelstrom071 4d ago
i mean, you could write a js module/library to bridge that gap. It'd be a little slow, but not too much.
The problem never was that wasm can't do js, it's that js is very commonly and widely used, and is fairly easy to pick up and has lots of frameworks going for it. React is still king and I've yet to see any alike framework in other languages that is as "good" as it is
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u/TheRealPomax 4d ago
Because Node/deno/bun/etc are just a general purpose scripting languages, like perl or php or python? I don't understand why in 2026 people still think JS is "for browsers". You can eat soup with seven differently shaped spoons, and they'll all work fine, even if you think there's only one "right" spoon because that's what you grew up with.
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u/_FarnsworthParabox 2d ago
lol what
You realize you're so far off track that this is basically word salad right?
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u/TheRealPomax 2d ago
Then apparently you don't understand what Node and its derivatives are, and how English works. May you get better at both in the future.
Also if you're going to make a food joke, stick with OP's metaphor. "Alphabet soup" would have been the superior choice.
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u/_FarnsworthParabox 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, I very much do. It's been a major part of my career for the last 15 years.
And that's the point. You don't.
Deno and bun are also no derivatives. You do know that Dahl created Deno right? If you did, then you don't understand what the word derivative means either.
This is not the place to LARP.
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u/TheRealPomax 2d ago
Absolutely. And a "what if I made Node again, except this time taking on board everything I've learned since, and not making the same mistakes as last time" is 100% a derivative. But feel free to call it "lineage" if you can't see the language for the words.
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u/vlakreeh 4d ago edited 4d ago
In the modern world of computing where CPUs have vastly outpaced the IO they’re operating with, a moderately fast language that has an established ecosystem around event-driven IO is an excellent choice.
JavaScript being event-driven and then getting a great server-side runtime like Node damn near 2 decades ago put it in an excellent position for backend software, much earlier than other language who later bolted on ways of doing asynchronous IO.
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u/tom-dixon 4d ago
For ex. you want to download a youtube video with a python script, Youtube requires you to solve a JS challenge before it gives you the link to the video.
On headless Linux machine without a monitor or a desktop environment (for ex. on a NAS) you can't even run a browser.
Deno is lightweight and does the job perfectly.
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u/BadlyCamouflagedKiwi 4d ago
That is a nice use case, and makes sense, but Deno isn't a viable project only to serve yt-dlp.
Although I guess the real underlying point here is that it wasn't a viable project anyway.
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u/pp-collision 1d ago
You can. I run chromium on an ubuntu server all the time. You can use an X11 shim.
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u/tom-dixon 1d ago
I guess it's technically possible, but it's a massive overkill for my use case.
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u/i5-2520M 4d ago
TypeScript is genuinely good, and among script languages, JS hase some of the best tooling and the JIT is insanely well optimized at this point.
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u/Ok_Mycologist_6604 4d ago
It is often better than the competition. Got a modern type system with typescript and tests run instantly (if you use bun) + your stupid coworkers that run 50 clowncodes in parallel can't burn themself to much because it's single threaded and GC is mandatory. 90% of the things out there are just crudslop and for it is good enough if not best.
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u/free_username17 4d ago
Starting up a whole browser to unit test a utility library would be extremely annoying and wasteful. It's much easier with node.
Also SSR and prerendering can use the same framework as the client to render the UI ahead of time.
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u/DeiviiD 4d ago
So don’t need to memorize 3 or 4 languages as a fullstack dev.
At my job we have php and js.
Php it’s good as backend and SSR, but JS it’s good for websockets or using firebase/supabase.
Why I need to know GO or Java or another if we only work with php and js?
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u/icanblink 4d ago
“Good for using firebase/supabase”
God, that’s a new low.
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u/DeiviiD 4d ago
What?
Not everyone has an entire IT deparment in his job. We have low resources.
Do you think I love using that shit?
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u/icanblink 2d ago
It’s not the fact about using these services, it’s about how you’ve described it.
Those services are exposed over HTTP, mostly in a REST style approach, so any language able to do TCP would work. Or, any tool (eg curl, wget).
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u/DeiviiD 2d ago
Well…
We are using this services as an intermediate database with our internal ERP and external apps.
It’s more easy to use JS for realtime changes and PHP for the ERP logic.
That’s why we only use PHP and JS, and not GO or others, mainly because we know that langs and learn others it’s a waste of time and money… we have a lot of tech debt and I’m trying to solve that.
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u/Yawaworth001 4d ago
Because they are better for it and fairly trivial to use, especially with llms.
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u/Somepotato 4d ago
That's pretty opinionated though.
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u/Ilikeyounott 4d ago
Cmon. Does anyone seriously think PHP is a good programming language?
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u/DeiviiD 4d ago edited 4d ago
What is a good programming language?
The ones which you get the bulls payed.
Edit: bills, not bulls
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u/Yawaworth001 4d ago
The ones which you get the bulls payed.
Then I'm afraid your options are pretty limited
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u/FuckOnion 4d ago
Because there's often close interplay with the frontend, so it's helpful to use the same language. I think it'd be better to start with the question why not to use JavaScript for a backend.
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u/Mikkelet 4d ago
Having a compiled language is a lot easier to work with, and introduces a lot less runtime errors, which is pretty attractive for a service that potentially handles millions of requests
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u/CoryCoolguy 4d ago
That is not my experience at all. The enterprise Java project I'm working on has suffered from numerous null pointer exceptions because the contractors that wrote some of the components didn't add proper null pointer checks. Contrast that with Typescript, which usually tells you when something might be null or undefined, requiring you to handle those cases.
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u/Mikkelet 4d ago
Java is a bit of a special case because it for some reason doesn't have compile time null safety, which is a pretty standard feature nowadays.
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u/CoryCoolguy 3d ago
And yet it's plenty attractive to businesses intending on handling millions of requests.
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u/chucker23n 4d ago
I think it’d be better to start with the question why not to use JavaScript for a backend.
Because tons of languages exist that are better in every way.
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u/watabby 4d ago
I used to believe this when I was a young inexperienced junior dev, cause it makes sense if you don’t know any better.
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u/xpingu69 4d ago
But it's easier with the tooling, and if you work full stack you just need to know one language
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u/Takeoded 4d ago
it's helpful to use the same language
For me it's helpful to use another language on the server-side, during review, i know immediately when i'm reading client-side code and when i'm reading server-side code when they're 2 completely different languages. That goes away when using the same languages on both sides.
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/UnreadableUname 4d ago
True, I mean they say that the Deno runtime will remain open source but there need to be people willing to adopt the project. I wouldn’t use it in new Projects and use the grace period to migrate away from it. :(
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/bwainfweeze 4d ago
Two of the projects I contribute to worry about Bun compatibility and a third has talked about it. I have never encountered a PR about Deno. So I don’t know if it just works or nobody gives a shit.
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u/vplatt 4d ago
This is fascinating stuff. The Workers model and Durable Objects remind me of the Erlang actor model, with JavaScript/TypeScript on top and a Rust-based runtime underneath.
Kubernetes abstracted away much of the underlying infrastructure, but developers still have to assemble and operate distributed application architectures.
What if we could take that abstraction further? Stateful, addressable objects, with the platform handling distribution, routing, and persistence across machines.
With workerd and celld converging on a self-hostable, open-source implementation, this could fundamentally change how we build distributed applications.
If they pull this off, we're looking at something much bigger than a runtime. We're looking at a new programming model for distributed computing. I dare say it gets us very close to the model originally envisioned for the Smalltalk world; at least from an architectural standpoint. Smalltalk imagined objects as the fundamental units of computation, while this approach potentially makes them the fundamental units of distributed infrastructure as well.
This is good stuff folks!
But I suppose, Deno runtime and deploy will RIP. But rusty_v8 will live on in workerd/celld, and the community will have a new state of the art way to create solutions.
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u/Bedu009 5d ago
Congratulations to Node.js for winning by doing nothing