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The runtime wars are over… and Node won
Deno’s retreat says more about the cost of replacing an ecosystem than the quality of its runtime.
Deno joining Cloudflare would be ordinary acquisition news if the announcement didn’t come with an expiration date for Deno itself.
On October 9, Ryan Dahl announced that the entire Deno team was joining Cloudflare. The runtime will receive another year of bug fixes and security updates before the team ends development. Deno Deploy gets six months before it shuts down. Both periods run from the announcement.
That is a fairly blunt outcome for something that offered a fresh start for server side JavaScript.
The person who created Node built an alternative that addressed problems with Node. Years of engineering followed. And now the original team is moving on while Node continues.
Calling that a Node victory seems reasonable.
Calling it proof that Deno was pointless would be lazy.
Deno had legitimate complaints
A formatter, linter, test runner, TypeScript support, and permissions built into the runtime. Deno put those things together instead of…
