1048: Deno Is Dead

Scott Tolinski (0:00)

What's up, everybody?

We are here for another Syntax Live. There's so much that happened. Again, there's, I feel like that's the intro to every single episode of this thing. But again, there's so much. In fact, just two hours ago or three hours ago, I don't know, Wes, Gemini 4 Argon was first released. One hour ago. One hour ago. I was way off. And we all had access to it a little bit early. So we have thoughts here, as well as Muse of Wonder, Claude Haiku 5.5, and a ton of other cool stuff, a new decision model that absolutely smashes. Jev, Jev is annihilated by this new model. You're going to want to stick around for that with me, as always, as CJ Reynolds and Wes Bos. What's up, guys?

Wes Bos (0:43)

Stoked to talk about absolutely everything that went down. And of course, if anybody was following all the picture frame madness, we'll be talking about that as well, which is a crazy, crazy, super fun weekend.

Scott Tolinski (0:56)

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about that, too.

CJ Reynolds (0:58)

Like you started a movement like that. Yeah, it was crazy to see all the like is great.

Scott Tolinski (1:03)

My dentist messaged me about it. Actually, I went to my dentist and he was like, Did you really hack that photo frame? I watched that video after you posted it. And now I really want to do it. And I was just like, Oh, yeah, we talked about it. It was very funny. He did not realize that. Yeah, it's all I have left.

Oh, yes. And guys, I also I found a community of developers that is messier than Web Developers, and I can't wait to share that with you all. Oh, yes. But guys, let's get into it real quick. Deno was acquired and then annihilated. I need to know more about this because I just saw it happen. I don't know nothing about this.

CJ Reynolds (1:41)

Yeah, let's get into it. So on October 9th, it was announced that Deno is joining Cloudflare. That's the headline. But as we'll show, Deno is also being sunsetted.

Deno is a secure JavaScript runtime. It's in the same lane as Bun or Node.js, created by the same creator of Node.js, but with a lot of ideas around what he could have done better in terms of Node.js.

So I've been a fan of Deno for a very long time. I think it was, I guess, last year where they reached really 99 percent compatibility with Node.js. So that was big news. And then recently on Syntax Weekly, we actually talked about Cell D, which is a project from Ryan Dahl as well. So this is Self-Hosted Distributed Durable Objects. And this project is actually what caught the eye of Cloudflare. So this project, you can essentially have a Cloudflare style stack, but self-hosted, and this was created by Ryan Dahl. So all of this coming together, and now the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare.

Quick highlights of what this actually means. So first, they're going to support Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year, we will end our development of the Deno runtime. So that right there is just initially a punch to the gut. Like what? A lot of companies bet on Deno or building on Deno. Also, Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare workers. JSR, so the JavaScript Registry, is going to continue operating. Their infrastructure is moving to Cloudflare. And then they will continue to support Rusty V8. So this is a Rust library that gives bindings to the V8 JavaScript engine to Rust. This is what Deno is built on top of, but a lot of other Rust projects use it as well. So, there's that, in positive news, like the reason why this could be good, even, like let's say you weren't using Deno as your production runtime, they're basically going all in on Cell D and the idea of self-hosted workers. So there's also a blog post on the Cloudflare page that talks about how Cell D showed that you could basically have Cloudflare worker style code, but self-hosted. And Cloudflare actually is okay with this. Like they don't want you to have lock-in. And they believe that with Cloudflare workers and durable objects, they've kind of created like a new computing primitive. And the fact that it can be run open-source.

And they also open-sourced WorkerD. So if you weren't familiar with it, WorkerD is actually the thing that powers Cloudflare workers. And it's totally open-source. You can actually run it on your own servers if you want to.