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404 Deno CEO not found

282 points by WhyNotHugo 7mo ago

mrtksn 7mo ago
What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime? What to they pitch to the early investors even?
- deleted 7mo ago
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- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime? Everything else. Seems everyone and their mother are building "platforms", so they can properly lock you in, look at Vercel for example, to get some inspiration where the rest is probably at least aiming. Not sure why people keep falling for it though, guess it's easy enough to get started that people don't really want to understand deeper, if you can pay someone $XXX/month to not have to think about it, many people tend to go that route, especially if VC-infested.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    The problem is that outside big corporations, devs nowadays aren't willing to pay for development tooling, although we surely like to be paid. Thus platforms and SaaS products, seem to be the only way to make sustainable open source products.
    - re-thc 7mo ago
      > devs nowadays aren't willing to pay for development tooling I can't speak generally because it varies but is this really the case here? Other posters have commented on missing features and issues with their product i.e. Deno Deploy so is it not willing to pay or not worth it?
      - mrtksn 7mo ago
        Devs are notoriously hard to sell. They are hard to impress(I can do that in a weekend, which is also probably true for Deno anyway) and stingy.
        re-thc 7mo ago
        > I can do that in a weekend, which is also probably true for Deno anyway You can build Deno or even Deno deploy in a weekend? Even AI can't (not properly). 1. People say things all the time especially online. They might even tweet about their weekend project YET they might still buy it. Not equivalent. 2. If you have to buy it is usually tied to a business reason e.g. make work better or their business and so there's a lot more to it e.g. safety, regulations, etc.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  Hosting (Deno Deploy), https://deno.com/deploy/pricing https://deno.com/deploy/pricing
- progx 7mo ago
  Wait until a big company buy them. That seems not to happen.
robutsume 7mo ago
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tossandthrow 7mo ago
I have switched entirely away from anything deno, even though I used it in supabase. But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to properly work on in. Cloud functions and weak desperation between dev and prod is a mess, even more so with agents in the loop.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  > But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to properly work on in. Why is that? Seems like an agent framework limitation, not a reasonable requirement in general. (I do not have this limitation, but I also have a custom agent stack)
  - simonw 7mo ago
    I've found myself occasionally wishing I had a monorepo purely for Claude Code for web (Anthropic's hosted version of Claude Code), since it can currently only work with one private repository at a time. On my own machine I have a dev/ folder full of checkouts of other repos, and I'll often run Claude Code or Codex CLI in that top level folder and tell it to make changes to multiple projects at once. That works just fine.
    - verdverm 7mo ago
      The "dev/" folder concept is what I give my agent, so I can select what I want it to have access to. On my computer, I have a few of those to group those that go together.
    - bcye 7mo ago
      Couldn’t you make a pseudo monorepo via git submodules?
      - verdverm 7mo ago
        Submodules are pain, use the dependency management systems for the languages in your monorepo.
pjmlp 7mo ago
Trying to pull people away from reference tooling requires lots of investment and historical has always failed. Eventually the reference implementation gets good enough, and that is it. In JavaScript case, the first error was to ignore compatibility with native addons and existing nodejs modules. The second was not providing a business value why porting, with the pain of compatibility, one because "it feels better" doesn't release budgets in most companies.
- philipallstar 7mo ago
  In this case I think the reference implementation was created by one of the deno founders.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    It was, but he went too far with the second attempt. Also not everyone gets it right, only because they got lucky once, history is full of one hit wonders.
    - philipallstar 7mo ago
      Well, indeed. History is full of zero-hitters, with a few nonzero hit-wonders.
irickt 7mo ago
The article is mostly a rant about Deno not making a public statement about layoffs. This links to the individual statements about leaving: https://www.reddit.com/r/Deno/comments/1rwjaeb/whats_going_on_at_deno/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Deno/comments/1rwjaeb/whats_going_o...
postepowanieadm 7mo ago
I'm afraid something like that could happen to bun.
- progx 7mo ago
  Anthropic acquired Bun, so money should not be a problem for the next couple of years.
  - verdverm 7mo ago
    It also means the Bun team is no longer in control. Acquisition has a similar time frame and we've seen numerous projects chart a similar path to irrelevance.
  - shimman 7mo ago
    Anthropic, the company that actually has much worse revenues and likely mislead the public? [1] That Anthropic? The same Anthropic that has taken billions of gulf state money where the countries are on the verge of divesting itself from the US or fear of potentially losing their refineries + oil fields for at least 50 years? That same Anthropic? This house of cards is about to collapse and lot of "smart" devs are going to act shocked when the water recedes. The same thing always happens: companies "adopt" open source then, unless you have monopoly, money problems eventually appear and leadership sees this lovely team with "bloated budget" in the bylines. [1] https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-gives-lesson-ai-revenue-hallucination-2026-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...
    - luckydata 7mo ago
      the sky is falling...
    - NewsaHackO 7mo ago
      I hate it when people use commentary articles as fake sources for their points. It's even more aggravating when the "journalists" are making points that play to the ignorance and outrage of the reader, as they know those readers are the easiest to bait for clicks and mislead. For instance, how is Anthropic claiming that its total revenue since January 2025 as $5 billion contradict that its expected run-rate revenue for the year 2026 is $19 billion?
0xfffafaCrash 7mo ago
I’m not familiar with the author but something about this post just seems mean-spirited and petty. Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than not. Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those who have apparently left or been let go have been major contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for your work — we’re better off for your contributions.
- progx 7mo ago
  Has any competitor copied anything from Deno?
  - ronsor 7mo ago
    Deno basically popularized the idea of a standalone JS runtime that primarily relies on standard Web APIs over "in-house" APIs like Node, although we can say that those standard APIs didn't exist yet when Node was created and for most of its rising period.
    - sheept 7mo ago
      Not only that, but they helped push for new web APIs and language features for server runtimes, like URLPattern
  - verdverm 7mo ago
    I always thought Deno was more or less trying to copy the Cloudflare (edge) runtime, but decided incompatibility was a good idea. The ecosystem bifurcation was the mistake, which they came around on, but it was already too late by then.
  - 0xfffafaCrash 7mo ago
    I think it’s fair to say that work on the experimental-strip-types option in Node was inspired/energized by a desire to try to catch up with the DX improvements found in Deno for Typescript-first development that is now the norm.
Lord_Zero 7mo ago
Does any of this transfer over to Bun as well?
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Definitely, as it depends on where Zig goes, and what Antrophic will make out of it.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  For me yes, I have never found these alternative runtimes appealing. However Anthropic owns Bun now, so a different story will unfold.
- imeron 7mo ago
  I honestly can't think of a single practical scenario where I'd pick Deno over Node + npm today. Bun, on the other hand, has pretty much claimed the performance crown for itself at this point.
- egeozcan 7mo ago
  Bun is pragmatic, extremely fast and self-contained. Ryan Dahl is a hero of mine but Deno could be neither of those, which is a shame, but to answer your question, no, not much of these can be said for Bun.
gkoberger 7mo ago
I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard. I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder. I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with. Comparing him to Nero is gross.
- simonw 7mo ago
  Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their earlier posts.
- echelon 7mo ago
  Fuck this blog post. I'll say it. This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down. We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in... How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort? I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do. At least they're trying. Can't even get a decent round of applause.
  - gkoberger 7mo ago
    Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he’s a lot closer to Robin Hood.
    - wahnfrieden 7mo ago
themarogee 7mo ago
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themarogee 7mo ago
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hardwaregeek 7mo ago
I'm not fully convinced that there's a tenable model for open source devtool companies. Usually there's some handwavy plan to do hosting or code quality that never comes to fruition. Hosting is a hard business and the 800 pound gorilla in the room of AWS is even harder to surmount. Otherwise, I'm not sure what business model you can look towards. Support maybe?
- phpnode 7mo ago
  People want open source software, but they do not want the compromises that come with funding it. When people try and fail then you get shitty blog posts like this one. It's sheer entitlement. I think the days of building open source tooling and expecting to be able to commercialise it are now completely gone.
- deleted 7mo ago
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- georgemcbay 7mo ago
  > Support maybe? LLMs seem likely to kill or at least vastly weaken the support model.
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    Tangentially related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 (Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team) And essentially one of the reasonings behind it was that people weren't taking support or buying templates etc. from tailwind because they were getting essentially both of these from LLM's.
- anon7000 7mo ago
  Yeah, I mean Deno’s success is predicated on enterprises moving production apps from NodeJS to Deno. Node is extremely established and entrenched, and migrating the goddamn runtime of a large production server is not usually an easy project. If I have a 5-10 year old Node project, it might work well on Deno, but almost no one has the time to champion a migration when it just doesn’t have that many benefits. Yes, it comes with batteries included, but a big node project already has setups handling things like testing, linting, formatting, and dependencies. Moving to Deno for any of those might actually be easy, but migrations in the JS ecosystem never end up being easy, so people who could sway the company to change tools don’t have the appetite to tell leadership about migration projects with minimal upside and unknown duration. And under a startup with an unknown future. NodeJS succeeded at undermining existing server toolchains, because web devs were easily sold on writing JS for their servers, so tons of successful startups built with Node, and when Node got pretty well established, it was easier to adopt for greenfield projects in the enterprise. Deno is Node, but better. So it’s not giving a whole market of devs access to a tool that is way easier to write for. It’s marginally easier to manage and you could maybe drop some other toolchain dependencies. But again, those toolchain things are automated/hidden away from developers directly… like they don’t care we use eslint, they just care CI catches problems before they hit prod and that the linter throws an error early in the process. It’s already easy for them to run locally. So it’s not like Deno lint changes anything about the dev user experience, it just changes what DevOps/platform teams have to manage.
MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
> What’s next for Deno? Who cares? Why does the world need so many fringe tools/runtimes? So much fragmentation. Why does every project have to be a long-term success? Put some stuff out if its misery. Don't waste the time of the already few open-source contributors who pour hours into something for no good reason.
- steve_adams_86 7mo ago
  Deno is much more than a fringe tool. It's a genuine improvement in many ways.
  - MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
    The world doesn't need a dozen JS runtimes. The world doesn't need a dozen JS engines. The world doesn't need many dozens of Linux distros. The world doesn't need a handful of BSD distros. The world doesn't need many dozens of package managers. The world doesn't need hundreds of JS frameworks. The world doesn't need dozens of programming languages or chat protocols or CI/CD systems. The world doesn't need dozens of init systems, service managers, display servers, audio stacks, universal app formats, build tools/bundlers. Deno may have dragged the JS runtime space forward, fully agree. Maybe it served its purpose and it is time to say goodbye.
    - steve_adams_86 7mo ago
      If Deno moved things forward, doesn't that suggest that we do need efforts like this to support ongoing progress? There doesn't seem to be strong evidence to the contrary in the JS ecosystem.
    - balamatom 7mo ago
      The world doesn't need so many people or anything they have to offer it.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  I'd argue that the mainstream, lowest-common-denominator tools are the ones which waste people's time. (Especially when they're backed by an incumbent. Deno, on the other hand, clicked immediately.)
mohsen1 7mo ago
Why this person is so mean to someone who gifted Deno and Node to the JS ecosystem? It's not fair. They are trying to build a company on top of open source.
- shimman 7mo ago
  Because the model of private capital using open source to make profits is a failure state that we need to get away from. There's no reason why the government can't sponsor open source projects, something tells me the vast majority of open source devs wouldn't mind a system where grants can be reward to projects that the public finds valuable. That would be much more sustainable than VC rat fucking the commons to make a buck while suckering in devs that were once good community stewards into dry husks that are only formed to generate profit.
  - phpnode 7mo ago
    Ok but those government grants don't really exist today and what you're arguing for is zero sustainability for open source projects. This is certain to lead to the death of open source - there's not even the reputational pay-off any more if the only real consumer is AI.
    - shimman 7mo ago
      ah yes the common rebuttal of "but this doesn't exists, so I want the boot to keep stomping on my face. Please don't do anything different! The boot is kinda nice actually now that I sustained enough nerve damage." Grants are a very effective model of support, it seems to work for entire industries + professions around the world. Even better when there is a body of professionals working democratically to decide which people should be awarded the grants. Just because you have a failure of imagination doesn't mean others do.
      - phpnode 7mo ago
        Bad faith reply. The government grants do not exist, it's not a failure of imagination, I too would like to live in that world, but we don't and aren't likely to any time soon. And even if we did, do you think that Deno would have been likely to receive a grant? I do not.
furyofantares 7mo ago
> I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I’d spent mastering Deno was a sunk cost. Do I continue building for the runtime, or go back to Node? I assume the author is aware that Ryan Dahl created that too? Not that it would make him immune to criticism, but the author comes off extremely petty.
- deleted 7mo ago
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0x1ceb00da 7mo ago
They should call the next js runtime "done"
- verdverm 7mo ago
  I have migrated away from NextJS for similar reasons of being too special case in the ecosystem. Next in particular is designed for the way Vercel runs applications and comes with extra pain if you don't run on edge. (see middleware as an example, I think they renamed it since I left)
hmokiguess 7mo ago
I could get behind some of this hate directed to Vercel’s CEO or even Cursor’s, but Deno is sort of like a breath of fresh air around the myriad of parasitic tech out there. Still, why so much hate? Who hurt you? What’s going on
colesantiago 7mo ago
As soon as Deno took money from Sequoia, this was bound to happen. So here is what is going to happen: Deno is going to 100% get acquired. Ryan Dahl is obviously rare talent and any company that gets Ryan would be incredibly lucky. He has already done a Google Brain Residency so it makes sense for him to go to OpenAI or another AI lab for developing AI agents. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426659
mattvr 7mo ago
Deno Deploy is actually an excellent product. My choice ranking is Deno Deploy > Fly.io > AWS for new projects, depending on complexity and needs. They also have a new Deno sandbox feature which is great for running untrusted code, AI agents, etc. The real question is can they adapt to customer feedback fast enough, focus priorities, adequately market & grow, make it profitable, etc. Bumpy road but definitely not doomed. [0] https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy
- steve_adams_86 7mo ago
  I was surprised by the tone about deploy in the blog post too. I think it's excellent. I use it for anything new that uses TypeScript.
Raed667 7mo ago
My prediction for 2023 is 2 out 3 (so far) > Despite the initial hype, Rome tools, Deno & Bun will be quasi abandoned as the ecosystem outpaces their release cycle and the benefits don’t merit the headache of migration. https://blog.raed.dev/posts/predictions_2023 https://blog.raed.dev/posts/predictions_2023
- teg4n_ 7mo ago
  Rome tools is now Biome and Biome is really good. The company didn't work out but the tool itself is better than ever.
- morphology 7mo ago
  I defaulted to Biome for all greenfield projects a year ago, and at this point you would have to drag me kicking and screaming back to ESLint and Prettier. I also defaulted to Bun and still think Bun is leagues better than Node.js but I now have my doubts about its future after seeing the OpenCode devs consciously minimize their dependency on Bun for strategic reasons.
- pier25 7mo ago
  Deno hasn't been abandoned though. The company still survives. These layoffs are probably to focus resources on the runtime and subhosting product. Bun is in much better shape than it was in 2023 and its future is less uncertain today than it was back then.
- fastball 7mo ago
  I think you are 0/3. - Bun just got acquired by Anthropic, which has seemingly accelerated development. Last release: 4 days ago. - Deno is still kicking as a company, this blog post notwithstanding. Last release: 3 days ago. - Rome was forked into Biome. Biome last release: 4 days ago.
neom 7mo ago
I won't speak for Ryan, but these last 7/8 months have been extra extra hard for me with Mikeal dying, and at least, Ryan was as close to Mikeal as I was, so I'd guess it's been a hard time for him too. Being ambitious and taking on a lot is always... a lot, and he's been at it with Oracle as well. It doesn't get any easier the older you get, to be honest. Cut him some slack eh?
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Oracle looks to me a distraction, that isn't what is going to bring users into Deno. For the rest, I can't comment on, all the best.
  - neom 7mo ago
    Thanks. Sure, it may have indeed become a distraction, maybe it always was... I don't know. Never the less, he is finishing what he started, and that is admirable. https://dev.ua/en/news/tvorets-nodejs-zbyraie-1758280906 https://dev.ua/en/news/tvorets-nodejs-zbyraie-1758280906 - https://www.devclass.com/development/2022/09/05/nodejs-creator-ryan-dahl-urges-oracle-to-release-javascript-trademark/1630492 https://www.devclass.com/development/2022/09/05/nodejs-creat...
- latchkey 7mo ago
  RIP Mikeal. I'm sorry for your loss.
  - neom 7mo ago
    Thanks for saying so. btw your hn plugin is really fucking good! Thanks. :)
    - latchkey 7mo ago
      Awesome! I'm glad you like it. Having trouble getting word out about it, so I appreciate the kind words.
jeremyscanvic 7mo ago
Like other commenters the tone of this post threw me off but I was really impressed by the design of the website. Congrats for building it, it shows your hard work and taste!
dgreensp 7mo ago
I find the irreverent tone refreshing, personally. As a founder who built all my prototypes and side projects on Deno for two years, I personally think Deno’s execution was just horrible, and avoidably so. Head-scratchingly, bafflingly bad decision-making. I was the first engineering hire at Meteor (2012-2016), and we made the mistake of thinking we could reinvent the whole app development ecosystem, and make money at it, so I have the benefit of that experience, but it is not really rocket science or some insight that I wouldn’t expect Ryan Dahl and team to have, in the 2020s. They were stretched thin with too many projects, which they were always neglecting or rewriting, without a solid business case. They coupled together runtime, framework, linting, docs, hosting, and packaging, with almost all of these components being inferior to the usual tools. The package system became an absolute nightmare. If the goal was to eventually replace Node and NPM with something where TypeScript was first-class, there was better security, etc, they could have done a classic “embrace and extend.”
- DimmieMan 7mo ago
  Pivoting to node support and even more-so rewriting deploy really hurt momentum on top of all those projects. Coming out swinging with 2.0 and then decreasing regions and rewriting the product that makes you money soon after was certainly a choice. While they’ve been doing that void 0 made a significantly better linter & formatter that can replace eslint, a perfect embrace and extend. Nodes improved and a lot of annoyances have been ironed out (at a user level at least), each passing day the benefits of deno reducing. Fresh is close to abandonware despite being a framework that could be the middle ground between htmx and js framework insanity with even 1 man-day a fortnight dedicated to it. JSR seems like it’s going nowhere and only exists to install @std. This was the final straw for me, if they bounce back in a few years hell yeah I’m in but I’m begrudgingly back to node for now.
  - dgreensp 7mo ago
    I agree with all this. I came to Deno because I needed a break from Node/NPM. I don’t agree with all of Node’s decisions (particularly the ES module debacle), but Node/NPM have improved over the years. A big problem with JSR was no private packages. All your code has to be open source. But JSR is the only way to get constraint solving in Deno, besides using NPM.
thinkingkong 7mo ago
It's easy to be critical in hindsight but honestly when Deno first came out it was pretty incredible. Even the whole idea about URL based imports makes lots of sense but it was incompatible with any of the existing toolchains that were wildly popular. At the same time, companies like Vercel launched a new kind of framework and leveraged that into a hosting business with I would say great success. They captured developers where they were at _today_, including acknowledging the demographics, the tools, the culture, etc.
- skybrian 7mo ago
  Compatibility aside, Url-based imports are a bad idea as soon as you go beyond writing your entire program in a single source file and want to keep imported versions of common dependencies in sync. It's nice for scripts, but a deno.json file is better.
mrcwinn 7mo ago
What nonsense. Does it count as a “clapback” when the CEO responds sensibly and takes responsibility? This is just pointless snark.
deleted 7mo ago
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zoogeny 7mo ago
I have always wanted Deno to succeed. But it just seems to be too full of contradictions. Their initial baffling stance about package.json was the first bad sign. I almost can't imagine the hubris of expecting devs to abandon such a large eco-system of packages by not striving for 100% support out of the gate. Of course they had to relent, but honestly the damage was done. They chose ideology over practicality and that doesn't bode well with devs. I think they saw Rust and thought that devs were willing to abandon C++ for a language that was more modern and secure. By touting these same benefits perhaps they were hoping for similar sentiment from the JavaScript community. Deno has some really good ideas (e.g. the library KV interface). I agree with a lot (but not all) of Dahl's vision. But the whole thing is just a bit too quirky for me to invest anything critical into an ecosystem that is one funding round away from disappearing completely.
Sophira 7mo ago
Before yt-dlp started recommending Deno as its JavaScript runtime, I had no idea it even existed. Since then, I know that it's there and that it's more secure than Node in some applications, and I can see using it being a good option. But it sounds like it might be too little too late? Going by this article, at least.
- cluckindan 7mo ago
  yt-dlp was definitely the reason for the increased adoption mentioned in the post. I wonder if the layoffs have a deeper connection to yt-dlp.
- muppetman 7mo ago
  Same, I remember googling Deno and going "Oh this new thing looks neat" - and then I haven't heard/seen/read a thing about it until this post. But I keep hearing about Bun and of course nodejs. Feel bad for them, they obviously just didn't capture a real userbase. I expect if yt-dlp hadn't started to require it they'd have just silently flamed out.
fnord77 7mo ago
> The harsh truth is that Deno’s offerings have failed to capture developers’ attention. I can’t pretend to know why — I was a fanboy myself — but far too few devs care about Deno. I never heard of Deno until today. So perhaps this was a marketing failure.
IshKebab 7mo ago
I really hope this is premature because Deno is easily the best thing to happen to the JS/TS ecosystem in years. I agree with all the comments saying this is unnecessarily critical. We're getting an amazing tool totally for free. Quit complaining. I would not be surprised if they get bought by one of the big AI players anyway, given the weird purchases of Bun and Astral.
hedayet 7mo ago
> Idle speculation has led to baseless rumours of an OpenAI acquisition. I’m not convinced that makes sense but neither does the entire AI industry. hmm, blog author doesn't know about Anthropic's Bun acquisition, and consequently shouldn't comment on "the entire AI industry"
hollowturtle 7mo ago
I had the feeling something wasn't going well as soon as the AI pivoting. My guess was that for Ryan being acquired like Bun was might have been the only road available
ashwinnair99 7mo ago
Deno always felt like something built for the right reasons but at the wrong time. Good tech losing isn't new, it's just always a bit sad when it happens slowly.
- Chyzwar 7mo ago
  No, they made many wrong architecture decisions that made it fringe project rather than mainstream. You could glimpse on how things could played out by looking into bun.js adoption.
deleted 7mo ago
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pragmatic 7mo ago
Is Deno a classic second system syndrome project? Seems so. All the breaks from the first system in the name of “we’re doing it right this time” probably killed the momentum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Even the best and brightest of us are still human.
babaganoosh89 7mo ago
Truth of the matter is Ryan Dahl is a suboptimal CEO. Being able to build good open source software does not have a strong correlation with being able to build a successful business.
paxys 7mo ago
> I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I’d spent mastering Deno was a sunk cost Hundreds of hours? I'm sorry but if you truly needed that much time to find your way around an incredibly straightforward runtime that's on you. Skills for Deno, Node.js, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, browser-based JS and all the rest are like 99% transferable. If Deno doesn't work for you then use something else. It would probably be simpler to switch than writing all these aggressive blog posts.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  The one that wasted me hundreds of hours was TypeScript on Node with ESM. The most common, familiar, boring stuff which everyone is intimately familiar with, right? Got shanghaied into TS-land right around Node 16 when they and TypeScript imposed mutually incompatible handling of ESM modules (that extensions mess). Not only the type checker fail to understand of the kind of JS I had been shipping (and testing, and documenting, and communicating) up to that point; both the immediate toolchain, and people's whole pattern language around the toolset, were entirely broken as soon as you were doing anything different from the kind of React.js that later became Vercel. Not only I was able to do 10% of what I was able to do previously conditional on jury-rigging the billion dollar stack to work, I also had a little cadre of happy campers on my ass blatantly gaslighting me that it is all, in fact, working; and suggesting the most inane "solutions" once I'd bent over backwards to demonstrate how there is, indeed, a problem of absurd dimensions, straight outta nowhere. Later I met more such people. Same people who would insist JS runtimes are not trivially interchangeable, having committed to not examine what they're doing beyond a meager level of abstraction. I see it as a rather perverse form of "working to spec" (have had to pick up surreal amounts of slack after such characters), but with incentives being what they are you get a cutthroat environment (such as the author of this blog post imagines to be living in), and from a cutthroat environment you get the LLMs eating everyone's breakfasts -- because no matter how yucky a word "synergy" is, synergizin' is that "fake open source" is designed to preclude, throughout the JS ecosystem. "Fake open source" is how I call MIT/BSD licensed devtools and frameworks from hyperscalers that don't need to do an opencore rugpull because they're a piece of a long-term ecosystem strategy. They benefit from immense decade-long marketing and astroturfing efforts, lending them "default status" in the mindshare; and ultimately serve to carry the vendor's preferred version of reality into unrelated downstream projects. Which is why they often spectacularly fail to respond to the community's needs: they are built to preclude, past a certain point, the empowerment of implementors as a community. Mastering some of that shit, now there was a sunk cost for me, but in modern JS land all these churning agglomerations play the role of "pay to play" gatekeepers. Considering what that's made the playing field be like, I'm happy pivoting to more niche technology just to keep away from said churning agglomerations.
shepherdjerred 7mo ago
I was really into Deno until it went all-in on nodejs compatibility (like Bun). At that point I was left wondering -- if Bun and Deno have essentially the same strategy/approach, why would I pick the less mature option? And so I ported everything to Bun
- robertjpayne 7mo ago
  Because Bun's runtime is a bug ridden mess. Say what you want about Deno but people that chose Bun's runtime over Deno's are either not really using Bun's runtime (just the package manager part) or are not running in production at scale.
  - shepherdjerred 7mo ago
    Yeah I’m not running it at scale. It’s been good for my projects though
ozten 7mo ago
For me Bun’s dramatic entrance and the a lack of any Deno response that reached my attention effectively evaporated any interest I would have in switching my runtime. I’m already set with my tooling and hosting.
nektro 7mo ago
i did not interpret this article as hate. this is very sad news and OP is being honest about the state of things and failings along the way. they even end with a plea that things turn around.
asim 7mo ago
Come on man. This stuff is hard. I was the guy on the other side writing these BS hit pieces. Then I raised funding and took a shot. It's so hard. It's like pushing a boulder up a mountain except you're expected to build a rocket ship on the way and blast off. It's not the analogy of falling off a cliff and building the rocket on the way down. Sure death is on the horizon and you can manage it, but the pressures are immense and so much of it you can't game. Initial hype is intoxicating and you might even have something of value but real business takes time. It's a boulder up a hill and you need to bring a lot of good people along the way to help you. OpenAI was 7 years of nothing working then boom. I hit 7 years and fatigue set in, but also life, I wasn't that same guy who started at 30. Give these people a break. Ryan has done great things with Node and Deno. Give him a break. Don't stomp on the guy. Give him some kudos. Help him FFS. Don't trash him. Shame honestly. Ryan keep up the great work. It's hard. Deno team, it's the effort and intention that counts. Good work. Regroup, try again.
- scubbo 7mo ago
  No-one who accepts investor money deserves any sympathy.
  - MainlyMortal 7mo ago
    You're literally on a VC forum.
    - scubbo 7mo ago
      Correct. What's your point?
      - MainlyMortal 6mo ago
        You know, I was initially dismissive of your comment but you have a point and I don't really. We're mostly here for the tech news and I actually agree with you.
        6mo ago
andrewstuart 7mo ago
The problem Deno faces is that nodejs is “good enough”. Pray you never have a “good enough” competitor. I felt it should have aimed to be a 100% drop in replacement for nodejs then innovated on top of that.
- nulltrace 7mo ago
  Tried moving a monorepo off Node once. The runtime swap was the easy part. What killed us was the 50-odd package.json files with node-specific stuff baked in. Conditional exports, postinstall scripts, engine constraints, pnpm overrides. Bun got this right by just eating all of that as-is. Deno asking you to throw out package.json on day one was basically asking you to rewrite your entire build config before you even got to try it.
lloydatkinson 7mo ago
I’m starting to think this guys obsession with writing hit pieces about Deno is not at all genuine and perhaps he is being paid.
arikrahman 7mo ago
Anthropic's acquisition might prove for the better if their able to avoid the same layoff situation.
qcautomation 7mo ago
[flagged]
jklmnopqrstuvw 7mo ago
I think the only real perk of Bun/Deno over Node is that they can run .ts directly and have better ES compatibility. I don’t need Deno’s permission system, but it’s on by default, so I went with Bun.
pier25 7mo ago
> Bun has far more bugs and compatibility issues than anyone will admit. Node still has too much friction around TypeScript and ECMAScript modules. I only use deps that support Bun like Hono and Drizzle but so far my experience has been flawless. And yeah Node sucks for TS in comparison to Deno or Bun.
barrrrald 7mo ago
Who hurt you?
pier25 7mo ago
The idea of Deno is brilliant... but they should have either focused on Node compat from the first day (like Bun did) or just keep doing their own thing with built-in APIs to solve the most common needs (db drivers, router, s3, etc). They had the right ideas but it's like investors panicked midway and demanded a change in direction.
- hajime-san 7mo ago
  https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3As3 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3... Setting aside the fact that the S3 built-in API is now neglected, I'm skeptical about the runtime providing such APIs. As Ruby on Rails does well, these are issues that should be handled by the framework, not the runtime. While these APIs may seem convenient at first glance, breaking changes to APIs integrated into the runtime are difficult. It's not impossible, but it would likely cause dissatisfaction among many users. Furthermore, constantly keeping up with updates to third-party products would result in immense maintenance costs. Users should also reconsider the extremely high backward compatibility that JavaScript has maintained before jumping on such hype.
  - pier25 7mo ago
    > I'm skeptical about the runtime providing such APIs. As Ruby on Rails does well, these are issues that should be handled by the framework, not the runtime. Well there's no Rails for JS and in case you're not aware there's an absolute security disaster going on with NPM. For a typical Node project dozens if not hundreds of dependencies need to be used. Eg Platformatic needs 258 dependencies of which 97 depend on a single maintainer. https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=platformatic#zoom=h https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=platformatic#zoom=h You only need a single dependency to become compromised. And as anyone who has maintained a Node app knows, with all those dependencies you're like 5 mins away from an incompat issue. Maybe another solution would be for the runtime to provide like a versioned standard suite of deps that matches the runtime version. So these are secure and fully compatible with the runtime and with each other.
    - 7mo ago
hluska 7mo ago
This is an absolutely horrible article. From totally over the top comparisons to an absolute lack of substance, this is no more than a collection of ‘haha me smart’ garbage mixed with personal attacks. Drunk sports fans are more coherent than this.
jaccola 7mo ago
The author should be the change they want to see in the world. Nothing is stopping them from making an alternative. > "I could continue but it would just be cruel to dissect further." in particular really rubbed me the wrong way for 2 reasons: 1) You acknowledge that you think you've already at least bordered on "cruel", why would you want this? It's not clever. 2) You have the arrogance to think your opinion means this much to the creator when they've achieved far more than you.
MOSI3 7mo ago
"Decimation" is to reduce by a tenth (and typically those being reduced would be forced to decide who to lose), so a poor comparison to "losing half your staff". If you're going to mention its Roman origins, then these details matter.
deleted 7mo ago
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krmbzds 7mo ago
I'm waiting for the "10 Things I Regret About Deno" blog post.

282 points by WhyNotHugo 7mo ago

What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime? What to they pitch to the early investors even?

deleted 7mo ago
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embedding-shape 7mo ago
> What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime? Everything else. Seems everyone and their mother are building "platforms", so they can properly lock you in, look at Vercel for example, to get some inspiration where the rest is probably at least aiming. Not sure why people keep falling for it though, guess it's easy enough to get started that people don't really want to understand deeper, if you can pay someone $XXX/month to not have to think about it, many people tend to go that route, especially if VC-infested.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  The problem is that outside big corporations, devs nowadays aren't willing to pay for development tooling, although we surely like to be paid. Thus platforms and SaaS products, seem to be the only way to make sustainable open source products.
  - re-thc 7mo ago
    > devs nowadays aren't willing to pay for development tooling I can't speak generally because it varies but is this really the case here? Other posters have commented on missing features and issues with their product i.e. Deno Deploy so is it not willing to pay or not worth it?
    - mrtksn 7mo ago
      Devs are notoriously hard to sell. They are hard to impress(I can do that in a weekend, which is also probably true for Deno anyway) and stingy.
      - re-thc 7mo ago
        > I can do that in a weekend, which is also probably true for Deno anyway You can build Deno or even Deno deploy in a weekend? Even AI can't (not properly). 1. People say things all the time especially online. They might even tweet about their weekend project YET they might still buy it. Not equivalent. 2. If you have to buy it is usually tied to a business reason e.g. make work better or their business and so there's a lot more to it e.g. safety, regulations, etc.
verdverm 7mo ago
Hosting (Deno Deploy), https://deno.com/deploy/pricing https://deno.com/deploy/pricing
progx 7mo ago
Wait until a big company buy them. That seems not to happen.

robutsume 7mo ago

[dead]

tossandthrow 7mo ago

I have switched entirely away from anything deno, even though I used it in supabase. But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to properly work on in. Cloud functions and weak desperation between dev and prod is a mess, even more so with agents in the loop.

verdverm 7mo ago
> But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to properly work on in. Why is that? Seems like an agent framework limitation, not a reasonable requirement in general. (I do not have this limitation, but I also have a custom agent stack)
- simonw 7mo ago
  I've found myself occasionally wishing I had a monorepo purely for Claude Code for web (Anthropic's hosted version of Claude Code), since it can currently only work with one private repository at a time. On my own machine I have a dev/ folder full of checkouts of other repos, and I'll often run Claude Code or Codex CLI in that top level folder and tell it to make changes to multiple projects at once. That works just fine.
  - verdverm 7mo ago
    The "dev/" folder concept is what I give my agent, so I can select what I want it to have access to. On my computer, I have a few of those to group those that go together.
  - bcye 7mo ago
    Couldn’t you make a pseudo monorepo via git submodules?
    - verdverm 7mo ago
      Submodules are pain, use the dependency management systems for the languages in your monorepo.

pjmlp 7mo ago

Trying to pull people away from reference tooling requires lots of investment and historical has always failed. Eventually the reference implementation gets good enough, and that is it. In JavaScript case, the first error was to ignore compatibility with native addons and existing nodejs modules. The second was not providing a business value why porting, with the pain of compatibility, one because "it feels better" doesn't release budgets in most companies.

philipallstar 7mo ago
In this case I think the reference implementation was created by one of the deno founders.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  It was, but he went too far with the second attempt. Also not everyone gets it right, only because they got lucky once, history is full of one hit wonders.
  - philipallstar 7mo ago
    Well, indeed. History is full of zero-hitters, with a few nonzero hit-wonders.

irickt 7mo ago

The article is mostly a rant about Deno not making a public statement about layoffs. This links to the individual statements about leaving: https://www.reddit.com/r/Deno/comments/1rwjaeb/whats_going_on_at_deno/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Deno/comments/1rwjaeb/whats_going_o...

postepowanieadm 7mo ago

I'm afraid something like that could happen to bun.

progx 7mo ago
Anthropic acquired Bun, so money should not be a problem for the next couple of years.
- verdverm 7mo ago
  It also means the Bun team is no longer in control. Acquisition has a similar time frame and we've seen numerous projects chart a similar path to irrelevance.
- shimman 7mo ago
  Anthropic, the company that actually has much worse revenues and likely mislead the public? [1] That Anthropic? The same Anthropic that has taken billions of gulf state money where the countries are on the verge of divesting itself from the US or fear of potentially losing their refineries + oil fields for at least 50 years? That same Anthropic? This house of cards is about to collapse and lot of "smart" devs are going to act shocked when the water recedes. The same thing always happens: companies "adopt" open source then, unless you have monopoly, money problems eventually appear and leadership sees this lovely team with "bloated budget" in the bylines. [1] https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-gives-lesson-ai-revenue-hallucination-2026-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...
  - luckydata 7mo ago
    the sky is falling...
  - NewsaHackO 7mo ago
    I hate it when people use commentary articles as fake sources for their points. It's even more aggravating when the "journalists" are making points that play to the ignorance and outrage of the reader, as they know those readers are the easiest to bait for clicks and mislead. For instance, how is Anthropic claiming that its total revenue since January 2025 as $5 billion contradict that its expected run-rate revenue for the year 2026 is $19 billion?

0xfffafaCrash 7mo ago

I’m not familiar with the author but something about this post just seems mean-spirited and petty. Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than not. Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those who have apparently left or been let go have been major contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for your work — we’re better off for your contributions.

progx 7mo ago
Has any competitor copied anything from Deno?
- ronsor 7mo ago
  Deno basically popularized the idea of a standalone JS runtime that primarily relies on standard Web APIs over "in-house" APIs like Node, although we can say that those standard APIs didn't exist yet when Node was created and for most of its rising period.
  - sheept 7mo ago
    Not only that, but they helped push for new web APIs and language features for server runtimes, like URLPattern
- verdverm 7mo ago
  I always thought Deno was more or less trying to copy the Cloudflare (edge) runtime, but decided incompatibility was a good idea. The ecosystem bifurcation was the mistake, which they came around on, but it was already too late by then.
- 0xfffafaCrash 7mo ago
  I think it’s fair to say that work on the experimental-strip-types option in Node was inspired/energized by a desire to try to catch up with the DX improvements found in Deno for Typescript-first development that is now the norm.

Lord_Zero 7mo ago

Does any of this transfer over to Bun as well?

pjmlp 7mo ago
Definitely, as it depends on where Zig goes, and what Antrophic will make out of it.
verdverm 7mo ago
For me yes, I have never found these alternative runtimes appealing. However Anthropic owns Bun now, so a different story will unfold.
imeron 7mo ago
I honestly can't think of a single practical scenario where I'd pick Deno over Node + npm today. Bun, on the other hand, has pretty much claimed the performance crown for itself at this point.
egeozcan 7mo ago
Bun is pragmatic, extremely fast and self-contained. Ryan Dahl is a hero of mine but Deno could be neither of those, which is a shame, but to answer your question, no, not much of these can be said for Bun.

gkoberger 7mo ago

I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard. I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder. I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with. Comparing him to Nero is gross.

simonw 7mo ago
Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their earlier posts.
echelon 7mo ago
Fuck this blog post. I'll say it. This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down. We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in... How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort? I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do. At least they're trying. Can't even get a decent round of applause.
- gkoberger 7mo ago
  Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he’s a lot closer to Robin Hood.
  - wahnfrieden 7mo ago

themarogee 7mo ago

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themarogee 7mo ago

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hardwaregeek 7mo ago

I'm not fully convinced that there's a tenable model for open source devtool companies. Usually there's some handwavy plan to do hosting or code quality that never comes to fruition. Hosting is a hard business and the 800 pound gorilla in the room of AWS is even harder to surmount. Otherwise, I'm not sure what business model you can look towards. Support maybe?

phpnode 7mo ago
People want open source software, but they do not want the compromises that come with funding it. When people try and fail then you get shitty blog posts like this one. It's sheer entitlement. I think the days of building open source tooling and expecting to be able to commercialise it are now completely gone.
deleted 7mo ago
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georgemcbay 7mo ago
> Support maybe? LLMs seem likely to kill or at least vastly weaken the support model.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  Tangentially related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 (Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team) And essentially one of the reasonings behind it was that people weren't taking support or buying templates etc. from tailwind because they were getting essentially both of these from LLM's.
anon7000 7mo ago
Yeah, I mean Deno’s success is predicated on enterprises moving production apps from NodeJS to Deno. Node is extremely established and entrenched, and migrating the goddamn runtime of a large production server is not usually an easy project. If I have a 5-10 year old Node project, it might work well on Deno, but almost no one has the time to champion a migration when it just doesn’t have that many benefits. Yes, it comes with batteries included, but a big node project already has setups handling things like testing, linting, formatting, and dependencies. Moving to Deno for any of those might actually be easy, but migrations in the JS ecosystem never end up being easy, so people who could sway the company to change tools don’t have the appetite to tell leadership about migration projects with minimal upside and unknown duration. And under a startup with an unknown future. NodeJS succeeded at undermining existing server toolchains, because web devs were easily sold on writing JS for their servers, so tons of successful startups built with Node, and when Node got pretty well established, it was easier to adopt for greenfield projects in the enterprise. Deno is Node, but better. So it’s not giving a whole market of devs access to a tool that is way easier to write for. It’s marginally easier to manage and you could maybe drop some other toolchain dependencies. But again, those toolchain things are automated/hidden away from developers directly… like they don’t care we use eslint, they just care CI catches problems before they hit prod and that the linter throws an error early in the process. It’s already easy for them to run locally. So it’s not like Deno lint changes anything about the dev user experience, it just changes what DevOps/platform teams have to manage.

MuffinFlavored 7mo ago

> What’s next for Deno? Who cares? Why does the world need so many fringe tools/runtimes? So much fragmentation. Why does every project have to be a long-term success? Put some stuff out if its misery. Don't waste the time of the already few open-source contributors who pour hours into something for no good reason.

steve_adams_86 7mo ago
Deno is much more than a fringe tool. It's a genuine improvement in many ways.
- MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
  The world doesn't need a dozen JS runtimes. The world doesn't need a dozen JS engines. The world doesn't need many dozens of Linux distros. The world doesn't need a handful of BSD distros. The world doesn't need many dozens of package managers. The world doesn't need hundreds of JS frameworks. The world doesn't need dozens of programming languages or chat protocols or CI/CD systems. The world doesn't need dozens of init systems, service managers, display servers, audio stacks, universal app formats, build tools/bundlers. Deno may have dragged the JS runtime space forward, fully agree. Maybe it served its purpose and it is time to say goodbye.
  - steve_adams_86 7mo ago
    If Deno moved things forward, doesn't that suggest that we do need efforts like this to support ongoing progress? There doesn't seem to be strong evidence to the contrary in the JS ecosystem.
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    The world doesn't need so many people or anything they have to offer it.
balamatom 7mo ago
I'd argue that the mainstream, lowest-common-denominator tools are the ones which waste people's time. (Especially when they're backed by an incumbent. Deno, on the other hand, clicked immediately.)

mohsen1 7mo ago

Why this person is so mean to someone who gifted Deno and Node to the JS ecosystem? It's not fair. They are trying to build a company on top of open source.

shimman 7mo ago
Because the model of private capital using open source to make profits is a failure state that we need to get away from. There's no reason why the government can't sponsor open source projects, something tells me the vast majority of open source devs wouldn't mind a system where grants can be reward to projects that the public finds valuable. That would be much more sustainable than VC rat fucking the commons to make a buck while suckering in devs that were once good community stewards into dry husks that are only formed to generate profit.
- phpnode 7mo ago
  Ok but those government grants don't really exist today and what you're arguing for is zero sustainability for open source projects. This is certain to lead to the death of open source - there's not even the reputational pay-off any more if the only real consumer is AI.
  - shimman 7mo ago
    ah yes the common rebuttal of "but this doesn't exists, so I want the boot to keep stomping on my face. Please don't do anything different! The boot is kinda nice actually now that I sustained enough nerve damage." Grants are a very effective model of support, it seems to work for entire industries + professions around the world. Even better when there is a body of professionals working democratically to decide which people should be awarded the grants. Just because you have a failure of imagination doesn't mean others do.
    - phpnode 7mo ago
      Bad faith reply. The government grants do not exist, it's not a failure of imagination, I too would like to live in that world, but we don't and aren't likely to any time soon. And even if we did, do you think that Deno would have been likely to receive a grant? I do not.

furyofantares 7mo ago

> I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I’d spent mastering Deno was a sunk cost. Do I continue building for the runtime, or go back to Node? I assume the author is aware that Ryan Dahl created that too? Not that it would make him immune to criticism, but the author comes off extremely petty.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

0x1ceb00da 7mo ago

They should call the next js runtime "done"

verdverm 7mo ago
I have migrated away from NextJS for similar reasons of being too special case in the ecosystem. Next in particular is designed for the way Vercel runs applications and comes with extra pain if you don't run on edge. (see middleware as an example, I think they renamed it since I left)

hmokiguess 7mo ago

I could get behind some of this hate directed to Vercel’s CEO or even Cursor’s, but Deno is sort of like a breath of fresh air around the myriad of parasitic tech out there. Still, why so much hate? Who hurt you? What’s going on

colesantiago 7mo ago

As soon as Deno took money from Sequoia, this was bound to happen. So here is what is going to happen: Deno is going to 100% get acquired. Ryan Dahl is obviously rare talent and any company that gets Ryan would be incredibly lucky. He has already done a Google Brain Residency so it makes sense for him to go to OpenAI or another AI lab for developing AI agents. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426659

mattvr 7mo ago

Deno Deploy is actually an excellent product. My choice ranking is Deno Deploy > Fly.io > AWS for new projects, depending on complexity and needs. They also have a new Deno sandbox feature which is great for running untrusted code, AI agents, etc. The real question is can they adapt to customer feedback fast enough, focus priorities, adequately market & grow, make it profitable, etc. Bumpy road but definitely not doomed. [0] https://deno.com/deploy https://deno.com/deploy

steve_adams_86 7mo ago
I was surprised by the tone about deploy in the blog post too. I think it's excellent. I use it for anything new that uses TypeScript.

Raed667 7mo ago

My prediction for 2023 is 2 out 3 (so far) > Despite the initial hype, Rome tools, Deno & Bun will be quasi abandoned as the ecosystem outpaces their release cycle and the benefits don’t merit the headache of migration. https://blog.raed.dev/posts/predictions_2023 https://blog.raed.dev/posts/predictions_2023

teg4n_ 7mo ago
Rome tools is now Biome and Biome is really good. The company didn't work out but the tool itself is better than ever.
morphology 7mo ago
I defaulted to Biome for all greenfield projects a year ago, and at this point you would have to drag me kicking and screaming back to ESLint and Prettier. I also defaulted to Bun and still think Bun is leagues better than Node.js but I now have my doubts about its future after seeing the OpenCode devs consciously minimize their dependency on Bun for strategic reasons.
pier25 7mo ago
Deno hasn't been abandoned though. The company still survives. These layoffs are probably to focus resources on the runtime and subhosting product. Bun is in much better shape than it was in 2023 and its future is less uncertain today than it was back then.
fastball 7mo ago
I think you are 0/3. - Bun just got acquired by Anthropic, which has seemingly accelerated development. Last release: 4 days ago. - Deno is still kicking as a company, this blog post notwithstanding. Last release: 3 days ago. - Rome was forked into Biome. Biome last release: 4 days ago.

neom 7mo ago

I won't speak for Ryan, but these last 7/8 months have been extra extra hard for me with Mikeal dying, and at least, Ryan was as close to Mikeal as I was, so I'd guess it's been a hard time for him too. Being ambitious and taking on a lot is always... a lot, and he's been at it with Oracle as well. It doesn't get any easier the older you get, to be honest. Cut him some slack eh?

pjmlp 7mo ago
Oracle looks to me a distraction, that isn't what is going to bring users into Deno. For the rest, I can't comment on, all the best.
- neom 7mo ago
  Thanks. Sure, it may have indeed become a distraction, maybe it always was... I don't know. Never the less, he is finishing what he started, and that is admirable. https://dev.ua/en/news/tvorets-nodejs-zbyraie-1758280906 https://dev.ua/en/news/tvorets-nodejs-zbyraie-1758280906 - https://www.devclass.com/development/2022/09/05/nodejs-creator-ryan-dahl-urges-oracle-to-release-javascript-trademark/1630492 https://www.devclass.com/development/2022/09/05/nodejs-creat...
latchkey 7mo ago
RIP Mikeal. I'm sorry for your loss.
- neom 7mo ago
  Thanks for saying so. btw your hn plugin is really fucking good! Thanks. :)
  - latchkey 7mo ago
    Awesome! I'm glad you like it. Having trouble getting word out about it, so I appreciate the kind words.

jeremyscanvic 7mo ago

Like other commenters the tone of this post threw me off but I was really impressed by the design of the website. Congrats for building it, it shows your hard work and taste!

dgreensp 7mo ago

I find the irreverent tone refreshing, personally. As a founder who built all my prototypes and side projects on Deno for two years, I personally think Deno’s execution was just horrible, and avoidably so. Head-scratchingly, bafflingly bad decision-making. I was the first engineering hire at Meteor (2012-2016), and we made the mistake of thinking we could reinvent the whole app development ecosystem, and make money at it, so I have the benefit of that experience, but it is not really rocket science or some insight that I wouldn’t expect Ryan Dahl and team to have, in the 2020s. They were stretched thin with too many projects, which they were always neglecting or rewriting, without a solid business case. They coupled together runtime, framework, linting, docs, hosting, and packaging, with almost all of these components being inferior to the usual tools. The package system became an absolute nightmare. If the goal was to eventually replace Node and NPM with something where TypeScript was first-class, there was better security, etc, they could have done a classic “embrace and extend.”

DimmieMan 7mo ago
Pivoting to node support and even more-so rewriting deploy really hurt momentum on top of all those projects. Coming out swinging with 2.0 and then decreasing regions and rewriting the product that makes you money soon after was certainly a choice. While they’ve been doing that void 0 made a significantly better linter & formatter that can replace eslint, a perfect embrace and extend. Nodes improved and a lot of annoyances have been ironed out (at a user level at least), each passing day the benefits of deno reducing. Fresh is close to abandonware despite being a framework that could be the middle ground between htmx and js framework insanity with even 1 man-day a fortnight dedicated to it. JSR seems like it’s going nowhere and only exists to install @std. This was the final straw for me, if they bounce back in a few years hell yeah I’m in but I’m begrudgingly back to node for now.
- dgreensp 7mo ago
  I agree with all this. I came to Deno because I needed a break from Node/NPM. I don’t agree with all of Node’s decisions (particularly the ES module debacle), but Node/NPM have improved over the years. A big problem with JSR was no private packages. All your code has to be open source. But JSR is the only way to get constraint solving in Deno, besides using NPM.

thinkingkong 7mo ago

It's easy to be critical in hindsight but honestly when Deno first came out it was pretty incredible. Even the whole idea about URL based imports makes lots of sense but it was incompatible with any of the existing toolchains that were wildly popular. At the same time, companies like Vercel launched a new kind of framework and leveraged that into a hosting business with I would say great success. They captured developers where they were at _today_, including acknowledging the demographics, the tools, the culture, etc.

skybrian 7mo ago
Compatibility aside, Url-based imports are a bad idea as soon as you go beyond writing your entire program in a single source file and want to keep imported versions of common dependencies in sync. It's nice for scripts, but a deno.json file is better.

mrcwinn 7mo ago

What nonsense. Does it count as a “clapback” when the CEO responds sensibly and takes responsibility? This is just pointless snark.

deleted 7mo ago

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zoogeny 7mo ago

I have always wanted Deno to succeed. But it just seems to be too full of contradictions. Their initial baffling stance about package.json was the first bad sign. I almost can't imagine the hubris of expecting devs to abandon such a large eco-system of packages by not striving for 100% support out of the gate. Of course they had to relent, but honestly the damage was done. They chose ideology over practicality and that doesn't bode well with devs. I think they saw Rust and thought that devs were willing to abandon C++ for a language that was more modern and secure. By touting these same benefits perhaps they were hoping for similar sentiment from the JavaScript community. Deno has some really good ideas (e.g. the library KV interface). I agree with a lot (but not all) of Dahl's vision. But the whole thing is just a bit too quirky for me to invest anything critical into an ecosystem that is one funding round away from disappearing completely.

Sophira 7mo ago

Before yt-dlp started recommending Deno as its JavaScript runtime, I had no idea it even existed. Since then, I know that it's there and that it's more secure than Node in some applications, and I can see using it being a good option. But it sounds like it might be too little too late? Going by this article, at least.

cluckindan 7mo ago
yt-dlp was definitely the reason for the increased adoption mentioned in the post. I wonder if the layoffs have a deeper connection to yt-dlp.
muppetman 7mo ago
Same, I remember googling Deno and going "Oh this new thing looks neat" - and then I haven't heard/seen/read a thing about it until this post. But I keep hearing about Bun and of course nodejs. Feel bad for them, they obviously just didn't capture a real userbase. I expect if yt-dlp hadn't started to require it they'd have just silently flamed out.

fnord77 7mo ago

> The harsh truth is that Deno’s offerings have failed to capture developers’ attention. I can’t pretend to know why — I was a fanboy myself — but far too few devs care about Deno. I never heard of Deno until today. So perhaps this was a marketing failure.

IshKebab 7mo ago

I really hope this is premature because Deno is easily the best thing to happen to the JS/TS ecosystem in years. I agree with all the comments saying this is unnecessarily critical. We're getting an amazing tool totally for free. Quit complaining. I would not be surprised if they get bought by one of the big AI players anyway, given the weird purchases of Bun and Astral.

hedayet 7mo ago

> Idle speculation has led to baseless rumours of an OpenAI acquisition. I’m not convinced that makes sense but neither does the entire AI industry. hmm, blog author doesn't know about Anthropic's Bun acquisition, and consequently shouldn't comment on "the entire AI industry"

hollowturtle 7mo ago

I had the feeling something wasn't going well as soon as the AI pivoting. My guess was that for Ryan being acquired like Bun was might have been the only road available

ashwinnair99 7mo ago

Deno always felt like something built for the right reasons but at the wrong time. Good tech losing isn't new, it's just always a bit sad when it happens slowly.

Chyzwar 7mo ago
No, they made many wrong architecture decisions that made it fringe project rather than mainstream. You could glimpse on how things could played out by looking into bun.js adoption.

deleted 7mo ago

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pragmatic 7mo ago

Is Deno a classic second system syndrome project? Seems so. All the breaks from the first system in the name of “we’re doing it right this time” probably killed the momentum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Even the best and brightest of us are still human.

babaganoosh89 7mo ago

Truth of the matter is Ryan Dahl is a suboptimal CEO. Being able to build good open source software does not have a strong correlation with being able to build a successful business.

paxys 7mo ago

> I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I’d spent mastering Deno was a sunk cost Hundreds of hours? I'm sorry but if you truly needed that much time to find your way around an incredibly straightforward runtime that's on you. Skills for Deno, Node.js, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, browser-based JS and all the rest are like 99% transferable. If Deno doesn't work for you then use something else. It would probably be simpler to switch than writing all these aggressive blog posts.

balamatom 7mo ago
The one that wasted me hundreds of hours was TypeScript on Node with ESM. The most common, familiar, boring stuff which everyone is intimately familiar with, right? Got shanghaied into TS-land right around Node 16 when they and TypeScript imposed mutually incompatible handling of ESM modules (that extensions mess). Not only the type checker fail to understand of the kind of JS I had been shipping (and testing, and documenting, and communicating) up to that point; both the immediate toolchain, and people's whole pattern language around the toolset, were entirely broken as soon as you were doing anything different from the kind of React.js that later became Vercel. Not only I was able to do 10% of what I was able to do previously conditional on jury-rigging the billion dollar stack to work, I also had a little cadre of happy campers on my ass blatantly gaslighting me that it is all, in fact, working; and suggesting the most inane "solutions" once I'd bent over backwards to demonstrate how there is, indeed, a problem of absurd dimensions, straight outta nowhere. Later I met more such people. Same people who would insist JS runtimes are not trivially interchangeable, having committed to not examine what they're doing beyond a meager level of abstraction. I see it as a rather perverse form of "working to spec" (have had to pick up surreal amounts of slack after such characters), but with incentives being what they are you get a cutthroat environment (such as the author of this blog post imagines to be living in), and from a cutthroat environment you get the LLMs eating everyone's breakfasts -- because no matter how yucky a word "synergy" is, synergizin' is that "fake open source" is designed to preclude, throughout the JS ecosystem. "Fake open source" is how I call MIT/BSD licensed devtools and frameworks from hyperscalers that don't need to do an opencore rugpull because they're a piece of a long-term ecosystem strategy. They benefit from immense decade-long marketing and astroturfing efforts, lending them "default status" in the mindshare; and ultimately serve to carry the vendor's preferred version of reality into unrelated downstream projects. Which is why they often spectacularly fail to respond to the community's needs: they are built to preclude, past a certain point, the empowerment of implementors as a community. Mastering some of that shit, now there was a sunk cost for me, but in modern JS land all these churning agglomerations play the role of "pay to play" gatekeepers. Considering what that's made the playing field be like, I'm happy pivoting to more niche technology just to keep away from said churning agglomerations.

shepherdjerred 7mo ago

I was really into Deno until it went all-in on nodejs compatibility (like Bun). At that point I was left wondering -- if Bun and Deno have essentially the same strategy/approach, why would I pick the less mature option? And so I ported everything to Bun

robertjpayne 7mo ago
Because Bun's runtime is a bug ridden mess. Say what you want about Deno but people that chose Bun's runtime over Deno's are either not really using Bun's runtime (just the package manager part) or are not running in production at scale.
- shepherdjerred 7mo ago
  Yeah I’m not running it at scale. It’s been good for my projects though

ozten 7mo ago

For me Bun’s dramatic entrance and the a lack of any Deno response that reached my attention effectively evaporated any interest I would have in switching my runtime. I’m already set with my tooling and hosting.

nektro 7mo ago

i did not interpret this article as hate. this is very sad news and OP is being honest about the state of things and failings along the way. they even end with a plea that things turn around.

asim 7mo ago

Come on man. This stuff is hard. I was the guy on the other side writing these BS hit pieces. Then I raised funding and took a shot. It's so hard. It's like pushing a boulder up a mountain except you're expected to build a rocket ship on the way and blast off. It's not the analogy of falling off a cliff and building the rocket on the way down. Sure death is on the horizon and you can manage it, but the pressures are immense and so much of it you can't game. Initial hype is intoxicating and you might even have something of value but real business takes time. It's a boulder up a hill and you need to bring a lot of good people along the way to help you. OpenAI was 7 years of nothing working then boom. I hit 7 years and fatigue set in, but also life, I wasn't that same guy who started at 30. Give these people a break. Ryan has done great things with Node and Deno. Give him a break. Don't stomp on the guy. Give him some kudos. Help him FFS. Don't trash him. Shame honestly. Ryan keep up the great work. It's hard. Deno team, it's the effort and intention that counts. Good work. Regroup, try again.

scubbo 7mo ago
No-one who accepts investor money deserves any sympathy.
- MainlyMortal 7mo ago
  You're literally on a VC forum.
  - scubbo 7mo ago
    Correct. What's your point?
    - MainlyMortal 6mo ago
      You know, I was initially dismissive of your comment but you have a point and I don't really. We're mostly here for the tech news and I actually agree with you.
      - 6mo ago

andrewstuart 7mo ago

The problem Deno faces is that nodejs is “good enough”. Pray you never have a “good enough” competitor. I felt it should have aimed to be a 100% drop in replacement for nodejs then innovated on top of that.

nulltrace 7mo ago
Tried moving a monorepo off Node once. The runtime swap was the easy part. What killed us was the 50-odd package.json files with node-specific stuff baked in. Conditional exports, postinstall scripts, engine constraints, pnpm overrides. Bun got this right by just eating all of that as-is. Deno asking you to throw out package.json on day one was basically asking you to rewrite your entire build config before you even got to try it.

lloydatkinson 7mo ago

I’m starting to think this guys obsession with writing hit pieces about Deno is not at all genuine and perhaps he is being paid.

arikrahman 7mo ago

Anthropic's acquisition might prove for the better if their able to avoid the same layoff situation.

qcautomation 7mo ago

[flagged]

jklmnopqrstuvw 7mo ago

I think the only real perk of Bun/Deno over Node is that they can run .ts directly and have better ES compatibility. I don’t need Deno’s permission system, but it’s on by default, so I went with Bun.

pier25 7mo ago

> Bun has far more bugs and compatibility issues than anyone will admit. Node still has too much friction around TypeScript and ECMAScript modules. I only use deps that support Bun like Hono and Drizzle but so far my experience has been flawless. And yeah Node sucks for TS in comparison to Deno or Bun.

barrrrald 7mo ago

Who hurt you?

pier25 7mo ago

The idea of Deno is brilliant... but they should have either focused on Node compat from the first day (like Bun did) or just keep doing their own thing with built-in APIs to solve the most common needs (db drivers, router, s3, etc). They had the right ideas but it's like investors panicked midway and demanded a change in direction.

hajime-san 7mo ago
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3As3 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3... Setting aside the fact that the S3 built-in API is now neglected, I'm skeptical about the runtime providing such APIs. As Ruby on Rails does well, these are issues that should be handled by the framework, not the runtime. While these APIs may seem convenient at first glance, breaking changes to APIs integrated into the runtime are difficult. It's not impossible, but it would likely cause dissatisfaction among many users. Furthermore, constantly keeping up with updates to third-party products would result in immense maintenance costs. Users should also reconsider the extremely high backward compatibility that JavaScript has maintained before jumping on such hype.
- pier25 7mo ago
  > I'm skeptical about the runtime providing such APIs. As Ruby on Rails does well, these are issues that should be handled by the framework, not the runtime. Well there's no Rails for JS and in case you're not aware there's an absolute security disaster going on with NPM. For a typical Node project dozens if not hundreds of dependencies need to be used. Eg Platformatic needs 258 dependencies of which 97 depend on a single maintainer. https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=platformatic#zoom=h https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=platformatic#zoom=h You only need a single dependency to become compromised. And as anyone who has maintained a Node app knows, with all those dependencies you're like 5 mins away from an incompat issue. Maybe another solution would be for the runtime to provide like a versioned standard suite of deps that matches the runtime version. So these are secure and fully compatible with the runtime and with each other.
  - 7mo ago

hluska 7mo ago

This is an absolutely horrible article. From totally over the top comparisons to an absolute lack of substance, this is no more than a collection of ‘haha me smart’ garbage mixed with personal attacks. Drunk sports fans are more coherent than this.

jaccola 7mo ago

The author should be the change they want to see in the world. Nothing is stopping them from making an alternative. > "I could continue but it would just be cruel to dissect further." in particular really rubbed me the wrong way for 2 reasons: 1) You acknowledge that you think you've already at least bordered on "cruel", why would you want this? It's not clever. 2) You have the arrogance to think your opinion means this much to the creator when they've achieved far more than you.

MOSI3 7mo ago

"Decimation" is to reduce by a tenth (and typically those being reduced would be forced to decide who to lose), so a poor comparison to "losing half your staff". If you're going to mention its Roman origins, then these details matter.

deleted 7mo ago

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krmbzds 7mo ago

I'm waiting for the "10 Things I Regret About Deno" blog post.