Node.js creator ditches Deno to work on open source Cloudflare Workers
Node.js creator Ryan Dahl is joining Cloudflare after the company announced the acquisition of Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime business he co-founded.
By The Register
Node.js creator Ryan Dahl is joining Cloudflare after the company announced the acquisition of Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime business he co-founded.
Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder will join Cloudflare with the wider Deno team. They are expected to work on Cloudflare Workers, the company’s platform for running applications across its network.
The deal follows Deno’s recent release of celld, an open-source implementation of Cloudflare’s Workers and Durable Objects programming model. Cloudflare plans to combine celld with workerd, its own open-source Workers runtime.
The aim is to make it easier for developers and organisations to run Workers applications on their own infrastructure, rather than relying solely on Cloudflare’s hosted service.
Dahl said the team was joining Cloudflare to help make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers. He has previously criticised conventional server development, arguing that developers are using the wrong model for building modern applications.
Cloudflare said Deno’s runtime will remain available for a period while the transition takes place, with security fixes and maintenance planned during that time.
The acquisition brings Dahl back into a major shift in server-side JavaScript development. He created Node.js before co-founding Deno with Belder as an alternative runtime designed to address some of Node’s original limitations.
The next stage will focus on integrating celld into workerd and developing support for self-hosted Workers applications.