Deno Joins Cloudflare: Acquisition and Future Plans
Cloudflare has acquired Deno, with plans to build on its open-source project 'celld' to enhance self-hosting capabilities for Cloudflare Workers. Deno's runtime will be supported for one more year before development ceases.
Deno Joins Cloudflare: Acquisition and Future Plans
Cloudflare has acquired Deno, a project initially developed by Ryan Dahl, the creator of both Deno and Node.js. This acquisition follows the release of the first version of celld in August, which is an open-source implementation of the Durable Objects pattern from Cloudflare Workers.
Cloudflare's goal with this acquisition is to build on celld to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model. This is further detailed in the Cloudflare blog.
However, Deno itself will not be maintained by Cloudflare beyond the next year. Cloudflare will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that, development of the Deno runtime will end, though the project will remain open source and open to contributions from others.
Ryan Dahl explained the decision in a comment on Hacker News, stating that it was a joint decision and that he agrees with it. He noted that while Deno has some good ideas and is well engineered, it ultimately is not solving big problems. He also mentioned that Deno has been pulled into the 'gravity well' of Node.js compatibility, which limits its potential for innovation.
Dahl expressed interest in building powerful new abstractions, such as those seen in celld, which relies on object storage for coordination and persistence. He also highlighted the permissions system in Deno, which allows for fine-grained control over file and network access.
Source: Simon Willison. This analysis is based on publicly available source material.
