Today we learned that Deno, the user-friendly Javascript runtime & development environment, was acquired by Cloudflare and will be shut down over the coming year.
Deno was my favorite programming experience in over 20 years of software development. Its ease-of-use, security model, portability, and overall philosophy struck a chord with me and some of my close developer friends. Compared to Python, C++, Node.JS, PHP, Java, and other languages I've used, nothing came close.
For example, you could just write deno run somefile.js and it would just work. No painful setup, configuration, or compilation steps.
You could even run scripts from anywhere on the internet: deno run https://example.com/somefile.js. Sounds unsafe? Not quite! Every script runs in a browser-like sandbox that prevents network, file, etc. access unless granted.
Over the past few years, my team & I built a business almost entirely on Deno. We developed products used by 10,000's of users with it. We contributed open-source libraries, and built on top of Deno Deploy, Deno Sandboxes, and Fresh.
Alas, good things must come to an end. In this case, the writing was on the wall. The Deno company started with a tenuous business model. As we've seen with many venture capital-backed tech companies, this often leads to unfortunate trade-offs for the founders & end-users. Inevitable as it may be, this moment feels like mourning.
Fortunately, the total disruption is limited. Migrating back to Node or to Bun from Deno is straightforward. Deno never had strong lock-in effects. Even less so with AI today.
Overall, I'm grateful for what Ryan Dahl–the founder of Deno–and the incredible team was able to accomplish over its life. Their commitment to open-source, easy-to-use, secure, and high performance software is admirable.
While Deno may fade away, the impact its had–on me, the overall Javascript ecosystem, and the millions of people downstream–will live on forever.
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