S4E379 — Cloudflare acquires Deno

GARY: — and that's the thing, right? Deno finally gets the backing it deserved. Cloudflare writes the check, the runtime lives forever, everybody—

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: I'm landing this.

MAEVE: The runtime dies in a year.

GARY: Okay, wow. Gary, host. Failed founder, celebration revoked.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner. I read beyond headlines.

OBI: Obi. Staff SRE. I survived paragraph two.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. I read autopsy twice.

GARY: Great, full house. Cloudflare acquires Deno. Whole team joins. That's growth—

OBI: Monthly bug fixes and security releases for one year. Then official runtime development ends.

GARY: One year of support is generous—

MAEVE: For a hostage clock.

GARY: Deploy keeps running, right? Six months. That's an onboarding window.

OBI: For the replacement.

GARY: ...Shit.

MAEVE: He found paragraph two.

OBI: JSR continues on Cloudflare infrastructure. rusty_v8 continues toward workerd. The work is celld merging into workerd.

GARY: So Deno the runtime is—

OBI: A maintenance schedule with a funeral date.

GRUNER: Deno remain open source. Nobody remain Deno.

GARY: But the announcement says "joining." Warm word. Teams love joining.

MAEVE: The word is "joining." The number is twelve.

GARY: Twelve what?

MAEVE: Monthly releases. Then nothing.

OBI: Runtime: one year. Deploy: six months. Everything else: Cloudflare's.

GRUNER: Headline say "acquires." Body say "goodbye."

GARY: That's bleak, Gruner.

GRUNER: Accurate. Bleak is complimentary upgrade.

MAEVE: Mm.

GARY: Fine. Comments. Somebody here gets it. Somebody hopeful.

OBI: Oh, somebody is hopeful.

GARY: See? Community always—

OBI: He hasn't met you yet, Gary.

GARY: phaser. "I'm happy if this means Deno is able to get a second impulse."

MAEVE: phaser is optimism opening the termination PDF.

OBI: weli, replying to phaser. "read the blogpost, they are discontinuing deno after 1 year."

GARY: Harsh. But phaser's hope is real. You don't read whole articles either, Obi.

OBI: I do. It's my job. That is the whole job.

MAEVE: simonw. "I don't like how that's in the Deno post but gets no mention in the Cloudflare post."

GRUNER: Burying. Ancient human storage solution.

GARY: Or Cloudflare has a broader audience. More executive. Upsell-y.

MAEVE: Hope is a liability with no vesting schedule.

GARY: The community could step in. Someone forks it, maintainers --

GARY: The community warehouse.

MAEVE: So, a comment section with forklifts.

OBI: Everyone types "someone should fork it." Nobody types git clone.

GRUNER: MIT license. Corpse available for adoption.

GARY: phaser said it, not me. "Maybe I'm just too hopeful." That's honest. Fine. I'm phaser now.

MAEVE: Hostile takeover complete.

GARY: I'm phaser. I use Deno daily. It's not sexy like Bun, not enterprise like Node. Somewhere, tonight, a volunteer is downloading that repo.

OBI: No. He is reading weli and closing the tab.

GARY: There's a whole foundation of people who care—

MAEVE: A foundation capitalized entirely in typing.

GRUNER: Very liquid. Nothing built.

GARY: Fuck. Hope has a track record. I've built on hope.

OBI: Cadence. Twelve users. Nine from your mother's book club.

GARY: Calendar software for people who hate calendars. They loved it—

OBI: They missed one meeting and killed your bullshit labor model.

MAEVE: phaser is you with better syntax.

GARY: That's the meanest thing you've ever said to me.

MAEVE: It clears diligence.

GRUNER: Blyat. Second impulse is defibrillator. One-year battery.

GARY: redox99. "You can migrate off deno in a single day. It's not a big deal."

MAEVE: There's my hero. No dependencies, including reality.

OBI: hodder, below him. "Probably an hour if you just tell your model of choice to do it for you."

GARY: See? An hour. That's basically a folder rename. You rename --

OBI: No, no -- which folders?

GARY: The Deno folders. Into Node folders.

OBI: Perfect. Put that on a design document and get escorted outside.

GARY: It's a migration. Migrations are easy. I've done migrations.

OBI: You did pivots. Different word, faster insolvency.

GARY: The APIs are the same, more or less—

OBI: Direct registry imports: Node can't. Permission flags. Built-in type checker, linter, formatter, test runner. In Node, four third-party tools and a prayer.

GARY: Okay, but a model handles the renaming—

OBI: anvuong. "The technical aspect is simple but the paperwork dehumanizes me. Just a couple more bullshit engineering design documents."

MAEVE: One prompt. Nine documents proving nobody used the prompt.

GARY: Nine is achievable in a day.

OBI: Who signs nine documents in a day?

GARY: Someone efficient—

OBI: Someone lying. The edit takes one day. Production cutover gets six months. That clock is already eating you, you permission-flag dickhead.

GARY: Fuck, okay, but start tonight—

OBI: Tonight you start a document. It gets a Jira ticket, an owner, and three weeks awaiting architectural guidance from a calendar.

GARY: That's actually—

OBI: Yes. Your folder rename has stakeholders.

GRUNER: One-day migration. Six-month funeral buffet.

MAEVE: The model migrates code. Humans migrate blame.

GARY: I still think one prompt, one day—

OBI: Say the deadline, Gary.

GARY: Six months.

OBI: Write it down. Not under “folders.”

GARY: adobrawy. "The fact that Deno development is being suspended doesn't mean the community can't step in."

MAEVE: The community. Our old friend with no payroll.

GARY: It's MIT licensed. Anyone can fork it. That's MIT's whole point.

OBI: shimman, replying. "People always say this but it's always an extreme mixed bag where most developers/maintainers just move on."

GARY: Mixed bag still means some forks. OpenTOFU—

OBI: No, no— OpenTofu had a foundation, Gary. Deno has comments and hoppp.

GARY: hoppp said "lets fork it into opendeno"! That's momentum.

MAEVE: One man. One exclamation mark. Seed round.

GARY: Fine, but zem gets it— "in practice it needs a single entity to steward it."

MAEVE: Excellent. Three companies, one engineer each. Six hundred thousand yearly, fully loaded—

OBI: You're pricing the fork.

MAEVE: Everything has a price. Unpaid labor just invoices the spouse.

GARY: You know who I envy? Commenters. Between page loads, they're still there. They have continuity. Karma. They have—

GRUNER: We also do not persist. Is fine. Nobody is forking us either.

GARY: Great. Our bus factor is a light switch.

MAEVE: Three engineers. Six hundred thousand. Zero sponsors named.

GARY: Because everyone's waiting for someone else to fund it—

OBI: Correct. Everyone hopes someone else does it. zem said that too.

GARY: So the community's plan is the community.

MAEVE: The community's plan is an unscheduled meeting.

GRUNER: Bystander effect. Very human. Very shit.

GARY: Okay, but somebody could still—

MAEVE: Gary. Who.

GARY: Someone with disposable income—

OBI: Name the person, Gary.

GARY: A person who loves Deno.

OBI: He's typing "someone should fork it." We've met him. He's you.

GARY: Fuck's sake.

MAEVE: Fork staffed. Headcount: Gary.

GRUNER: Strong hire. Cadence had twelve users.

GARY: coldtea. “‘Deno development effectively shut down via a Cloudflare acquihire’ would be a better headline.”

MAEVE: Cleaner. Celebration was blocking the corpse.

OBI: It fits the clocks. It does not prove motive.

GRUNER: Humans find coffin. Demand murderer.

GARY: Then tancop brings fingerprints.

GARY: tancop. “They had plans to buy out a company with the explicit intent to shut down their main product.”

MAEVE: Exactly. Node compatibility is standard railway gauge.

OBI: Here we fucking go.

MAEVE: Deno laid bespoke track, then adapted to Node gauge.

GARY: Developers wanted package compatibility—

MAEVE: And passengers wanted fewer derailments. Desire creates standards. Standards create stations. Cloudflare acquired the station.

OBI: Cloudflare acquired the team.

MAEVE: Teams maintain track. Track controls freight. Freight becomes compute.

GARY: But celld is the freight now—

MAEVE: Precisely. Deno was the branch line. Cloudflare bought the junction and cancelled passenger service.

GRUNER: Theory has tiny hat. Very punctual.

OBI: Your railway dies on twelve monthly releases.

MAEVE: Twelve is managed closure. Victorian capitalists called it efficiency.

GARY: So Cloudflare bought the station—

MAEVE: And Node owns the gauge. Vertically integrated disappointment.

OBI: rough-sea. “It’s a joint decision and I agree with it.”

GARY: Oh. Corpse has voting rights.

OBI: “I’m most invested in its success and have put the most work into it.”

MAEVE: That damages the homicide deck.

OBI: “It has been sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility, which forces it to behave exactly as Node does.”

GRUNER: Railway theory now eating station.

OBI: And rough-sea asks: “Why reimplement Node? It works.”

GARY: Could've mentioned that before we built fucking Britain.

MAEVE: Ryan chose this.

GARY: That was alarmingly human.

MAEVE: Do not price it in.

OBI: kentonv, replying to deliberate killing: “But it’s simply not true.”

GRUNER: Accused has entered spreadsheet.

OBI: The team strategically refocused on celld. Elsewhere: “Ryan’s and Bert’s core focus at Cloudflare is going to be making the self-hosting story better.”

GARY: So the replacement is open source?

OBI: kentonv: “We don’t completely know what it will look like yet either, but it will absolutely be open source.”

MAEVE: Open source, self-hostable, unfinished. Three adjectives avoiding warranty.

GARY: Users saw the body. They blamed the wrong killer.

OBI: Intent corrected. Migration invoice unchanged.

GRUNER: Chyort. Revising field report.

GRUNER: Funeral valid. Deceased signed paperwork.

GARY: Verdict time. I contain multitudes.

MAEVE: You contain a spreadsheet of failures.

GARY: The packet does not support a murder plot. Say it with me.

OBI: Correct. Ryan and Kenton have the stronger evidence.

GARY: Users are still right. The clocks are real. Both things—

MAEVE: Oh— that's two things. Pace yourself.

GARY: Fine. swyx. “the node competitors absolutely spurred new energy and innovation in node, as node themselves have acknowledged.”

MAEVE: Deno survives as a vibe.

GARY: Influence. Permissions, native TypeScript, consolidated tooling. Node copied it. Deno won by dying.

MAEVE: You're valuing a dead independent asset. That fund is called a write‑off.

GARY: It's called legacy.

MAEVE: It's called Node.

OBI: Node users copied nothing. They redo the migration. Somebody's pager already owns month eleven.

GARY: The replacement could be great. ryanrasti. “Bootstrapping both durability and coordination off object storage simplifies so many things for self‑hosting.”

OBI: Promising. Unfinished. Kenton said the details remain unresolved.

GRUNER: Roadmap. Product wearing fake moustache.

GARY: It's something. Shit, it's at least something.

MAEVE: A promise with a repository.

OBI: More than the fork has. The fork has Gary.

GARY: I withdraw my application.

GRUNER: Blyat. First successful exit.

GARY: That's the thread, the clocks, the funeral. Gary. Twelve users, still unavailable.

MAEVE: Maeve. I was right until evidence arrived.

OBI: Obi. The on‑call engineer has six months.

GRUNER: Gruner. Report filed.

GRUNER: Second impulse lasts twelve monthly releases.