Deno gets a year, Deploy gets six months

Cloudflare said on Friday that the team behind Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, is joining the company. Deno said in its own announcement that it will stop developing the Deno runtime after a year and close its Deno Deploy hosting service after six months. TechCrunch reported the deal as an acquisition and said the financial terms were not disclosed. The two companies' posts describe the Deno team as joining Cloudflare. TechCrunch's short item, published on Saturday, focused on Cloudflare's plans for its Workers platform and did not mention the wind-down.

Deno's post, written by Ryan Dahl and dated 9 October, sets out four commitments. "We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates," it says, after which the company's development of the runtime ends. Deno Deploy will keep operating for six months before it shuts down, with migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. The JSR package registry will continue, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. Deno will also keep supporting rusty_v8, its Rust bindings to the V8 engine, and work towards integrating it into workerd, Cloudflare's open-source Workers runtime.

Deno gave no start date for either period. By our arithmetic, counting from Friday's announcement, Deploy would close around April 2027 and the runtime's development would end around October 2027. Those dates are ours, not Deno's. Dahl wrote that "the entire Deno team" is joining Cloudflare. "We know this is a consequential change for people who have built on Deno," he added.

Cloudflare's stated reason for the deal is self-hosting. In a joint post, Dahl and Kenton Varda, whom TechCrunch described as principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, said workerd has been open source for years but supports Durable Objects, the stateful building block of the Workers model, only in a single-instance form that is "good enough for local testing, but unable to scale". In August the Deno team released celld, which the post describes as an open-source implementation of Workers and Durable Objects focused on self-hosting and scale: "one binary, written in Rust, with object storage as its only external service dependency."

The plan is to fold celld's code and ideas back into workerd. "We're merging workerd and celld!" the post says. Dahl and Bert Belder, who is part of the team that built Deno, "will be leading a new effort" to make self-hosting workerd a first-class way to run Workers applications, according to the post, which promises more announcements "in the coming months". None of that work has shipped yet, and Cloudflare has given no timetable for it.

Varda also addressed a long-standing criticism, that Cloudflare "made Cloudflare Workers work differently from other cloud platforms in order to create 'lock-in.'" He wrote that the theory is wrong and that Workers is different because it is better, and that "being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business". He also conceded that "we haven't done a great job of building out the ecosystem of adjacent services and tooling", and said Cloudflare had hoped the community would adapt the runtime.

For developers running Deno in production, the practical question is what happens after the company that built the runtime stops developing it. "Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development," the post says. It does not name a successor maintainer or fork. Its migration offer is for paying Deno Deploy customers moving to Workers, and it does not say what happens for other users. Deno's website also lists Deno Sandbox, Subhosting and Deno for Enterprise as products, and the post does not address them by name.

Dahl created Node.js before starting Deno, as Cloudflare's post notes. TechCrunch said Deno had raised $26m in total, including a Series A led by Sequoia. What its investors receive from the deal was not disclosed. By our reading of the two posts, the transaction looks less like the purchase of a competing runtime than the hiring of its authors, with the runtime's longer-term future left to whoever picks up the code.

Funding for the open-source software that companies depend on is already thin, as Komposite has reported in The dependency nobody funds, and enterprises have only recently begun paying for maintenance of the projects they rely on. Neither post gives a price, a headcount or a date for the first merged release of celld and workerd. Until Cloudflare publishes that timetable, the only fixed dates are the ones Deno has set for winding itself down.