Ryan Dahl joins Cloudflare as Deno seeks a new open-source home
Cloudflare has bought Ryan Dahl’s company, Deno, and plans to bring Dahl and 12 colleagues onto its team to expand the Workers platform, potentially for open-source use. The deal marks a shift for Dahl: he now argues that developers choosing Node.js to build servers are taking the wrong approach, favouring Cloudflare’s serverless model instead.
Cloudflare will maintain the Deno runtime with bug fixes and security patches for one year, while Dahl seeks a new home for the open-source project; the company plans to end its development. Deno, launched in 2018 as a rewrite of Node.js, had 400,000 monthly users in August, but Dahl says pressure to match Node’s compatibility limited its ability to stand apart. Node.js, which Dahl launched in 2009, powers about 30 million websites. The article also describes Durable Objects, Cloudflare’s system for stateful applications, and Dahl’s project celld, which aims to make that technology usable beyond Cloudflare.
- Cloudflare acquired Deno and hired Ryan Dahl and 12 colleagues.
- Deno will receive security patches for one year as Dahl seeks a new home.
- Dahl is shifting his focus to Cloudflare Workers and open-source development.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Dahl’s case is that developers building server-side applications should consider serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers, which can reduce the need to manage infrastructure and offer tools for stateful applications. Deno’s effort to remain compatible with Node.js may also have constrained its ability to develop a distinct approach, so finding a new open-source home could let the project pursue that potential independently.
The case against
Developers may reasonably favour Node.js and conventional servers because Node is widely used, supports a large ecosystem and offers teams more control over where and how applications run. Cloudflare’s plan to stop developing Deno after a year of maintenance also raises a practical concern: moving towards a single provider’s platform can create reliance on that provider, while Deno’s future stewardship remains unsettled.
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Originally published by The Register as “Node.js creator ditches Deno to work on open source Cloudflare Workers”.