[HN Gopher] 404 Deno CEO not found
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       404 Deno CEO not found
        
       Author : WhyNotHugo
       Score  : 240 points
       Date   : 2026-03-21 15:10 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dbushell.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dbushell.com)
        
       | mrtksn wrote:
       | What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a
       | JS runtime? What to they pitch to the early investors even?
        
         | embedding-shape wrote:
         | > What is Deno's business model? How do you build business
         | around a JS runtime?
         | 
         | Everything else. Seems everyone and their mother are building
         | "platforms", so they can properly lock you in, look at Vercel
         | for example, to get some inspiration where the rest is probably
         | at least aiming.
         | 
         | Not sure why people keep falling for it though, guess it's easy
         | enough to get started that people don't really want to
         | understand deeper, if you can pay someone $XXX/month to not
         | have to think about it, many people tend to go that route,
         | especially if VC-infested.
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | The problem is that outside big corporations, devs nowadays
           | aren't willing to pay for development tooling, although we
           | surely like to be paid.
           | 
           | Thus platforms and SaaS products, seem to be the only way to
           | make sustainable open source products.
        
             | re-thc wrote:
             | > devs nowadays aren't willing to pay for development
             | tooling
             | 
             | I can't speak generally because it varies but is this
             | really the case here? Other posters have commented on
             | missing features and issues with their product i.e. Deno
             | Deploy so is it not willing to pay or not worth it?
        
               | mrtksn wrote:
               | Devs are notoriously hard to sell. They are hard to
               | impress(I can do that in a weekend, which is also
               | probably true for Deno anyway) and stingy.
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | Hosting (Deno Deploy), https://deno.com/deploy/pricing
        
         | progx wrote:
         | Wait until a big company buy them. That seems not to happen.
        
       | tossandthrow wrote:
       | I have switched entirely away from anything deno, even though I
       | used it in supabase.
       | 
       | But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to
       | properly work on in.
       | 
       | Cloud functions and weak desperation between dev and prod is a
       | mess, even more so with agents in the loop.
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | > But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to
         | properly work on in.
         | 
         | Why is that? Seems like an agent framework limitation, not a
         | reasonable requirement in general. (I do not have this
         | limitation, but I also have a custom agent stack)
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | I've found myself occasionally wishing I had a monorepo
           | purely for Claude Code for web (Anthropic's hosted version of
           | Claude Code), since it can currently only work with one
           | private repository at a time.
           | 
           | On my own machine I have a dev/ folder full of checkouts of
           | other repos, and I'll often run Claude Code or Codex CLI in
           | that top level folder and tell it to make changes to multiple
           | projects at once. That works just fine.
        
             | verdverm wrote:
             | The "dev/" folder concept is what I give my agent, so I can
             | select what I want it to have access to. On my computer, I
             | have a few of those to group those that go together.
        
             | bcye wrote:
             | Couldn't you make a pseudo monorepo via git submodules?
        
               | verdverm wrote:
               | Submodules are pain, use the dependency management
               | systems for the languages in your monorepo.
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | I don't think there's a way to have that work in Claude
               | Code for web, since each checkout there uses a custom
               | GitHub access token scoped to a single repository.
        
               | verdverm wrote:
               | GitHub tokens can span more than one repo or org if the
               | account requesting has access to them. Is this supported
               | on the non-web version?
               | 
               | (I was going to try claude again this weekend, but when I
               | tried to login, got an error and am reminded how much
               | down time I experience from Anthropic, arg...)
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | The non web version uses whatever credentials you have
               | setup yourself, so it works just fine.
        
               | verdverm wrote:
               | Is that host level or can I provide scoped tokens based
               | on what I'm doing?
               | 
               | In other words, do Anthropic tools provide any
               | affordances for this or is it something I have to manage
               | externally?
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | I'm just talking about the version of Claude Code which
               | runs in containers on their infrastructure here - they
               | call it "Claude Code on the web" (terrible name) and you
               | access it through their native apps or from
               | https://claude.ai/code
               | 
               | That product only works against one GitHub repo at a
               | time. The Claude Code you install and run locally doesn't
               | have a GitHub attachment at all and can run against
               | whatever you checkout yourself.
               | 
               | Here's an open feature request about it:
               | https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23627
        
           | redkoala wrote:
           | This site (from nx), while biased, explains it best.
           | https://monorepo.tools/
           | 
           | In a poly repo setup, agents are less effective having to
           | infer changes across repo boundaries using specs rather than
           | code as context. Changes that impact multiple repos are also
           | much messier to wrangle.
        
             | verdverm wrote:
             | Monorepos come with a lot of pain too. Two sides of the
             | same coin. I manage the build system for a large monorepo.
             | Questions that will get you to a primary source of pain...
             | 
             | How do you minimally build based on the changeset? How do
             | you know this is sufficient for correctness? What happens
             | when feature branches get out of date and don't see the
             | upstream change that breaks the local branch? How do you
             | version subprojects, as they change or as a whole?
             | 
             | Monorepos have a habit of creating hidden dependencies. The
             | languages you use can help or hurt here.
        
         | notnullorvoid wrote:
         | > But I need to have everything in a mono repo for agents to
         | properly work on in.
         | 
         | Why was this a problem with Deno? Up until recently you had to
         | use package.json and npm/pnpm for it to work, but even then it
         | was better than Bun or Node since you could use import map to
         | avoid compiling packages for testing etc (Node and Bun's type
         | stripping doesn't work across local monorepo dependencies, and
         | tsx produces mangled source maps making debugging a hassle).
         | Now Deno has built-in workspace/monorepo support in deno.json.
        
       | pjmlp wrote:
       | Trying to pull people away from reference tooling requires lots
       | of investment and historical has always failed.
       | 
       | Eventually the reference implementation gets good enough, and
       | that is it.
       | 
       | In JavaScript case, the first error was to ignore compatibility
       | with native addons and existing nodejs modules.
       | 
       | The second was not providing a business value why porting, with
       | the pain of compatibility, one because "it feels better" doesn't
       | release budgets in most companies.
        
         | philipallstar wrote:
         | In this case I think the reference implementation was created
         | by one of the deno founders.
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | It was, but he went too far with the second attempt.
           | 
           | Also not everyone gets it right, only because they got lucky
           | once, history is full of one hit wonders.
        
             | philipallstar wrote:
             | Well, indeed. History is full of zero-hitters, with a few
             | nonzero hit-wonders.
        
       | irickt wrote:
       | The article is mostly a rant about Deno not making a public
       | statement about layoffs. This links to the individual statements
       | about leaving:
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/Deno/comments/1rwjaeb/whats_going_o...
        
       | postepowanieadm wrote:
       | I'm afraid something like that could happen to bun.
        
         | progx wrote:
         | Anthropic acquired Bun, so money should not be a problem for
         | the next couple of years.
        
           | verdverm wrote:
           | It also means the Bun team is no longer in control.
           | Acquisition has a similar time frame and we've seen numerous
           | projects chart a similar path to irrelevance.
        
           | shimman wrote:
           | Anthropic, the company that actually has much worse revenues
           | and likely mislead the public? [1] That Anthropic? The same
           | Anthropic that has taken billions of gulf state money where
           | the countries are on the verge of divesting itself from the
           | US or fear of potentially losing their refineries + oil
           | fields for at least 50 years? That same Anthropic?
           | 
           | This house of cards is about to collapse and lot of "smart"
           | devs are going to act shocked when the water recedes.
           | 
           | The same thing always happens: companies "adopt" open source
           | then, unless you have monopoly, money problems eventually
           | appear and leadership sees this lovely team with "bloated
           | budget" in the bylines.
           | 
           | [1] https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropi
           | c-g...
        
             | luckydata wrote:
             | the sky is falling...
        
             | NewsaHackO wrote:
             | I hate it when people use commentary articles as fake
             | sources for their points. It's even more aggravating when
             | the "journalists" are making points that play to the
             | ignorance and outrage of the reader, as they know those
             | readers are the easiest to bait for clicks and mislead. For
             | instance, how is Anthropic claiming that its total revenue
             | since January 2025 as $5 billion contradict that its
             | expected run-rate revenue for the year 2026 is $19 billion?
        
               | apgwoz wrote:
               | > Anthropic claiming that its total revenue since January
               | 2025 as $5 billion contradict that its expected run-rate
               | revenue for the year 2026 is $19 billion?
               | 
               | Isn't the "exceeding $5BN" comment a lifetime revenue?
               | ... on $30BN (edit: previously said spent) raised (or
               | something ridiculous.)
               | 
               | A lot of the commentary on the frontier model companies
               | is based on how much money they've spent to the
               | relatively small amount they've made in return, and the
               | skepticism, especially given almost continuous reporting,
               | that deploying AI in a variety of situations doesn't seem
               | to yield favorable business outcomes. OpenAI shifting to
               | enterprise / coding type stuff this week seems, also,
               | potentially informative. Is Gen AI actually useful for
               | anything but code? Signs keep pointing to no... and even
               | then, we're in the early stages of figuring out how to
               | build without destroying everything... something Amazon
               | just recognized as possible with their recent shopping
               | outage.
        
               | NewsaHackO wrote:
               | > on $30BN spent (or something ridiculous.)
               | 
               | Where did you get that figure? The filing says 10 billion
               | has been spent on training and serving customers.
        
               | apgwoz wrote:
               | Whoops! Not spent, raised.
        
       | 0xfffafaCrash wrote:
       | I'm not familiar with the author but something about this post
       | just seems mean-spirited and petty.
       | 
       | Deno might not succeed as a project, especially with strong
       | competition from Bun as an alternative to Node, but I would say
       | that Deno has been more a force for bettering the ecosystem than
       | not.
       | 
       | Many of those at Deno, including Ryan as well as some of those
       | who have apparently left or been let go have been major
       | contributors to the web development ecosystem. Thank you all for
       | your work -- we're better off for your contributions.
        
         | progx wrote:
         | Has any competitor copied anything from Deno?
        
           | ronsor wrote:
           | Deno basically popularized the idea of a standalone JS
           | runtime that primarily relies on standard Web APIs over "in-
           | house" APIs like Node, although we can say that those
           | standard APIs didn't exist yet when Node was created and for
           | most of its rising period.
        
             | sheept wrote:
             | Not only that, but they helped push for new web APIs and
             | language features for server runtimes, like URLPattern
        
           | verdverm wrote:
           | I always thought Deno was more or less trying to copy the
           | Cloudflare (edge) runtime, but decided incompatibility was a
           | good idea. The ecosystem bifurcation was the mistake, which
           | they came around on, but it was already too late by then.
        
           | 0xfffafaCrash wrote:
           | I think it's fair to say that work on the experimental-strip-
           | types option in Node was inspired/energized by a desire to
           | try to catch up with the DX improvements found in Deno for
           | Typescript-first development that is now the norm.
        
           | ZebulonP wrote:
           | I don't think I'd go as far as "copying" but Deno was the
           | first to aggressively push for web standards in server-side
           | runtimes and certainly helped accelerate getting them adopted
           | in that environment.
           | 
           | I work at Cloudflare on Workers (but infrequently work on our
           | runtime) and I've always been pretty impressed with Deno.
           | Their recent-ish support for built-in OpenTelemetry is
           | something we've been wanting to do for a while and have been
           | working on, but Deno was able to build a good implementation
           | of that in that time.
        
             | kentonv wrote:
             | Cloudflare Workers was actually pushing for web standards
             | on the server side several months before Deno was
             | announced. :)
             | 
             | Though Ryan of course had a lot more clout from day 1 than
             | I did.
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Bun, competition?
         | 
         | Zig is yet to be 1.0, and who knows what anthropic will make
         | out of it.
         | 
         | They can even pivot yet again back into node, as most
         | acquisitions go.
        
           | nine_k wrote:
           | In the mindshare, certainly.
           | 
           | Bun to Deno is what Zig i to Rust: a much simpler, much
           | easier way to overcome its common predecessor's shortcomings.
           | Not nearly as thoroughly and revolutionarily, but still.
        
             | pjmlp wrote:
             | What matters is business users.
        
           | pier25 wrote:
           | You know any services as big as X or Claude Code built with
           | Deno?
           | 
           | AFAIK the biggest users of Deno are using their subhosting
           | service (Netlify, Slack, etc) to allow third parties to
           | execute TS code.
        
         | riazrizvi wrote:
         | Isn't it reasonable bitterness? He invested a lot of his own
         | life on a promise that didn't pan out, and there's probably a
         | lot of people in that community. Leadership comes with
         | responsibility and consequences.
         | 
         | Content marketed at wannabe startup founders tends to be
         | encouraging and panglossian. It's good to see here what you're
         | signing up for if you succeed with some degree of traction.
        
           | Yhippa wrote:
           | > He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't
           | pan out
           | 
           | Whose fault is that?
        
             | yladiz wrote:
             | So just don't trust people or organizations? Like sure it's
             | the author's fault in a sense but should they have just not
             | trusted in the first place?
        
           | chipgap98 wrote:
           | > He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't
           | pan out
           | 
           | So did the people who built Deno
        
       | Lord_Zero wrote:
       | Does any of this transfer over to Bun as well?
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Definitely, as it depends on where Zig goes, and what Antrophic
         | will make out of it.
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | For me yes, I have never found these alternative runtimes
         | appealing.
         | 
         | However Anthropic owns Bun now, so a different story will
         | unfold.
        
         | imeron wrote:
         | I honestly can't think of a single practical scenario where I'd
         | pick Deno over Node + npm today. Bun, on the other hand, has
         | pretty much claimed the performance crown for itself at this
         | point.
        
         | egeozcan wrote:
         | Bun is pragmatic, extremely fast and self-contained. Ryan Dahl
         | is a hero of mine but Deno could be neither of those, which is
         | a shame, but to answer your question, no, not much of these can
         | be said for Bun.
        
       | gkoberger wrote:
       | I didn't like the tone of this. Building a company is hard.
       | Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard.
       | 
       | I know on HN we don't always love CEOs, and that's okay... the
       | ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech
       | has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But
       | Ryan Dahl isn't doing that; he's a tinkerer and a builder.
       | 
       | I dunno, I just don't like this vibe of "what have you done for
       | me recently" in this post, especially given he skipped over the
       | company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is
       | responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I
       | really felt at home with.
       | 
       | Comparing him to Nero is gross.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like
         | a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their
         | earlier posts.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Fuck this blog post.
         | 
         | I'll say it.
         | 
         | This author is being an asshole and punching good people when
         | they're down.
         | 
         | We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps
         | trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us).
         | Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for
         | decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering
         | from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems
         | that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning
         | every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us,
         | spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country
         | they do business in...
         | 
         | How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
         | 
         | I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks
         | are trying to do.
         | 
         | At least they're trying.
         | 
         | Can't even get a decent round of applause.
        
           | gkoberger wrote:
           | Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees
           | Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he's a lot closer to Robin Hood.
        
             | wahnfrieden wrote:
             | If Robin Hood was CEO presiding over a hierarchy of wage
             | workers, with VC backing to shoot for unicorn status
        
               | gkoberger wrote:
               | He may have the same title, but he's way closer to an
               | engineer than Elon/Bezos/etc.
               | 
               | My analogy was taking VC money and using it to build an
               | open source tool.
        
           | saghm wrote:
           | > We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps
           | trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us).
           | Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations
           | for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition.
           | Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary
           | systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web,
           | turning every channel into an advertising shakedown,
           | monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus
           | in every country they do business in...
           | 
           | > How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
           | 
           | According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from
           | venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit
           | disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open
           | source effort"
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | I'm sick of open source "purism" too.
             | 
             | It's almost all caused by the OSI.
             | 
             | The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who
             | benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit.
             | 
             | Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so.
             | 
             | Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah -
             | let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go
             | live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions,
             | while the original authors see limited or no upside.
             | 
             | The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the
             | hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to
             | expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a
             | business around it. Another way is building an open core
             | plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the
             | business.
             | 
             | Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It
             | helps the experiment evolve faster.
             | 
             | Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and
             | Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be
             | directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and
             | valiant effort.
             | 
             | We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to
             | shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants.
             | 
             | This entire conversation has become perverted to the point
             | we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to
             | operate independently of the giants that control the world.
             | 
             | Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk,
             | trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
        
               | CrimsonRain wrote:
               | OSI is a plague and many people here swear by it blindly.
               | They hate the big hyperscalers but play right into their
               | arms.
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | To the point with exception of Emacs, GCC and the Linux
               | kernel, we can assert the GPL is dead for most practical
               | purposes.
        
               | prmoustache wrote:
               | sorry but your post makes no sense.
               | 
               | Open source is a kind of licenses. Hyperscalers are a
               | kind of service providers.
               | 
               | You cannot oppose these 2, these are completely unrelated
               | concepts.
        
               | echelon wrote:
               | That's cute to think that they're unrelated, but open
               | source is fundamentally about freedom.
               | 
               | The walls around us are constantly being built up and
               | caving in. Hyperscalers are trying to own more and more
               | of the commons.
               | 
               | The web is becoming atrophied, search is a sales funnel,
               | communication is taxed, we're about to be asked to use ID
               | to use the Internet, ... everything is being stolen from
               | us.
               | 
               | The two could not possibly be more related.
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | > calling out Ryan directly for some reason
         | 
         | Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs)
         | get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar
         | about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times
         | since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital
         | (private equity).
        
           | phpnode wrote:
           | These things are easy to say but just because someone has the
           | title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human
           | feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a
           | Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same
           | job title.
        
             | verdverm wrote:
             | > void of human feelings
             | 
             | What if we reframe this about how the CEO treats their
             | users and employees? Why does Ryan deserve to be free from
             | criticism?
        
               | phpnode wrote:
               | Do you have any special insight here or are you
               | speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from
               | criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy
               | for people who try things even if they fail, particularly
               | when they've offered their services to the community for
               | free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering
               | node.js)
        
               | verdverm wrote:
               | > Do you have any special insight here or are you
               | speculating?
               | 
               | I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for
               | this one individual.
               | 
               | When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very
               | interesting conversation after hours, and with beers,
               | about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the
               | well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there.
               | It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I
               | work my ass off for him.
               | 
               | A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my
               | paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did
               | the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer
               | before it all fell apart.
               | 
               | People can appear very different publicly than privately,
               | and they can change over time.
        
               | abnercoimbre wrote:
               | The reverse is true: asshole bosses who do right by
               | workers quietly. Sometimes they're public assholes and
               | privately terrible though. But sometimes (perhaps very
               | rarely) they're openly caring AND do the right thing
               | behind curtains.
               | 
               | I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is
               | complex and varied.
        
             | atherton94027 wrote:
             | Well the people who get laid off also have feelings, not
             | sure why we should care more about the ceo's feelings so
             | much that we shouldn't criticize them
        
               | phpnode wrote:
               | I'm not saying that we should care more for the CEO, but
               | that we should have empathy for someone who is,
               | ultimately, an engineer who built something and gave it
               | away for free, watched everyone else around him get rich
               | off the back of his hard work, and then tried to do
               | something worthwhile again _and still chose to give it
               | away for free_. There 's a lot of immoral CEOs out there,
               | I'm yet to see evidence that Dahl is one of them.
        
               | verdverm wrote:
               | > There's a lot of immoral CEOs out there, I'm yet to see
               | evidence that Dahl is one of them.
               | 
               | I don't see any such claim in the post. The criticism is
               | about Ryan the CEO, not Ryan the person.
               | 
               | Besides the title, from the end of the post:
               | 
               | > I'm not trying to hate on Dahl but c'mon bro you're the
               | CEO. What's next for Deno? Give ~me~ ~users~ anyone a
               | reason to care.
               | 
               | Perhaps you know Ryan and read too much into the
               | criticism?
        
           | ixtli wrote:
           | its so strange to see so many people who will never be handed
           | 5 million dollars to write a vm jumping in front of criticism
           | for one guy that did. sorry but when you become a public
           | figure in this way you should _expect_ to be subjected to a
           | different sort of public scrutiny than, say, a rank and file
           | employee who they pay.
           | 
           | i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the
           | wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying
           | that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw
           | aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as
           | they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
        
         | phpnode wrote:
         | Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in
         | the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions
         | like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a
         | business with actual employees.
         | 
         | If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would
         | be criticising that too.
        
         | hardwaregeek wrote:
         | Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package
         | management story was a mistake. But the people were still
         | trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine
         | love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who
         | put in several years of their life, with the resulting
         | opportunity cost.
        
         | evbogue wrote:
         | Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and
         | will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made
         | along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over
         | the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a
         | personality for many people, always has been since he decided
         | to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he
         | created Node.js.
         | 
         | I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that
         | forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs
         | to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never
         | supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.
         | 
         | I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this
         | opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I
         | can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of
         | my Deno servers right now.
        
           | KyleJune wrote:
           | I'm planning on using Deno long term too and have also made
           | some contributions to their standard library. But I
           | completely disagree with you on NPM support. I think that gap
           | early on contributed to bun's success. I almost quit using it
           | because of how difficult it was to use react with Deno. Now
           | it's pretty easy to use react and other npm packages with
           | Deno. Before that, a lot of the most popular packages were
           | just forks of npm packages adapted for Deno, but not as well
           | maintained since less people were using them. Then deduping
           | dependencies was just harder when they were all urls. If your
           | package had a dependency using a different version url, you'd
           | need an import map just to remap them all to using the same
           | version. I'm pretty happy with the current deno.json with jsr
           | and npm compatibility.
        
             | evbogue wrote:
             | As an early Deno purist I must invoke the 10 Mistakes talk
             | that Ryan gave when he launched Deno: https://m.youtube.com
             | /watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&t=11s&pp=ygUScnlhb...
        
             | afavour wrote:
             | As someone who has mostly just tinkered with this stuff
             | (while using Node extensively at work) I see two truths:
             | 
             | - Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were
             | clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES
             | modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and
             | browser compatible APIs, etc etc
             | 
             | - that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a
             | VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that
             | destroyed the chances of a restart happening.
             | 
             | I'm just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster
             | and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing
             | from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don't
             | trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long
             | term.
        
               | ameliaquining wrote:
               | Would something else that wasn't a VC-funded startup
               | really work better? The technical problem seems
               | fundamental.
        
               | afavour wrote:
               | Yes, the technical problem is fundamental. But if Deno
               | managed to be a truly great runtime that solved a lot of
               | people's gripes with Node _and_ made ES modules etc the
               | price of admission for using it there would have been
               | momentum to create a new module ecosystem.
               | 
               | But once you add that NPM compatibility layer the
               | incentives shift, it just isn't worth anyone's while to
               | create new, modern modules when the old ones work well
               | enough.
               | 
               | It all feels similar to the Python 2 vs 3 dilemma. They
               | went the other way and hey, it was a years long quagmire.
               | But the ecosystem came out of it in a much better place
               | in the end.
        
               | josephg wrote:
               | Personally I've moved to bun. Its basically identical to
               | node out of the box - almost all nodejs projects just
               | work. But its usually faster. And it can run typescript
               | files directly. And it has a JS bundler & minifier built
               | in. And it can --watch for changes.
               | 
               | I hope nodejs copies these features. They're great.
        
         | dangoodmanUT wrote:
         | Yeah, on top of that bringing in social media politics into it
         | is weird, makes it hard to take this as pure/useful criticism
        
         | colesantiago wrote:
         | Some businesses don't need to be VC backed though.
         | 
         | That is the problem.
        
           | gkoberger wrote:
           | Agreed. But building something new takes capital, and it's
           | really hard to find it for an open source tool.
           | 
           | FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees),
           | so there is a model there that works.
        
         | Aldipower wrote:
         | True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner
         | with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started
         | to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building
         | things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious
         | and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is
         | embarrassing.
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | JavaScript on the server goes all the way back to Netscape
           | days with LiveWire.
        
             | Aldipower wrote:
             | Yes, I have a SGI Indigo2 with NetScape FastTrack with
             | server-side JavaScript running in my basement! But it is
             | not the same as Node though. ;-)
             | 
             | I am selling it btw! Look at the CRT-screenshots. :-)
             | https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-
             | nets...
        
               | pjmlp wrote:
               | Oh man, it is really cool, hope it gets a nice new owner.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff;
         | standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use
         | "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."
        
           | ajkjk wrote:
           | at a practical level that word hasn't meant "one in ten" for
           | like, decades. probably just need to get used to it.
        
           | piva00 wrote:
           | Semantic drift has always happened and will always happen in
           | languages.
           | 
           | Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute
           | destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted
           | energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
        
           | fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
           | Etymology is not usage though. I get where you're coming
           | from, but fighting vernacular is all but useless outside of
           | academia.
        
           | Leszek wrote:
           | Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before
           | throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release
           | from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a
           | permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff).
           | "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a
           | standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average".
           | It's ok for words to change meaning over time.
        
         | nslsm wrote:
         | Given the footer of the blog I'm not surprised the author
         | really enjoys the smell of his own farts.
        
           | totallymike wrote:
           | I'm confused. What about the footer are you referring to?
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | Is there a good example of an Open Source project that was born
         | out of VC money? Not a failed attempt of hockey-stick growth
         | that open-sources its code upon shutting down commercial
         | operation, but a genuinely healthy FOSS project that started as
         | a VC-funded company, and still is going strong?
         | 
         | In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes:
         | openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth
         | fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how
         | they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS
         | project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.
        
       | hardwaregeek wrote:
       | I'm not fully convinced that there's a tenable model for open
       | source devtool companies. Usually there's some handwavy plan to
       | do hosting or code quality that never comes to fruition. Hosting
       | is a hard business and the 800 pound gorilla in the room of AWS
       | is even harder to surmount. Otherwise, I'm not sure what business
       | model you can look towards. Support maybe?
        
         | phpnode wrote:
         | People want open source software, but they do not want the
         | compromises that come with funding it. When people try and fail
         | then you get shitty blog posts like this one. It's sheer
         | entitlement. I think the days of building open source tooling
         | and expecting to be able to commercialise it are now completely
         | gone.
        
         | georgemcbay wrote:
         | > Support maybe?
         | 
         | LLMs seem likely to kill or at least vastly weaken the support
         | model.
        
         | anon7000 wrote:
         | Yeah, I mean Deno's success is predicated on enterprises moving
         | production apps from NodeJS to Deno. Node is extremely
         | established and entrenched, and migrating the goddamn runtime
         | of a large production server is not usually an easy project. If
         | I have a 5-10 year old Node project, it _might_ work well on
         | Deno, but almost no one has the time to champion a migration
         | when it just doesn't have that many benefits.
         | 
         | Yes, it comes with batteries included, but a big node project
         | already has setups handling things like testing, linting,
         | formatting, and dependencies. Moving to Deno for any of those
         | _might_ actually be easy, but migrations in the JS ecosystem
         | never end up being easy, so people who could sway the company
         | to change tools don't have the appetite to tell leadership
         | about migration projects with minimal upside and unknown
         | duration. And under a startup with an unknown future.
         | 
         | NodeJS succeeded at undermining existing server toolchains,
         | because web devs were easily sold on writing JS for their
         | servers, so tons of successful startups built with Node, and
         | when Node got pretty well established, it was easier to adopt
         | for greenfield projects in the enterprise.
         | 
         | Deno is Node, but better. So it's not giving a whole market of
         | devs access to a tool that is way easier to write for. It's
         | marginally easier to manage and you could maybe drop some other
         | toolchain dependencies. But again, those toolchain things are
         | automated/hidden away from developers directly... like they
         | don't care we use eslint, they just care CI catches problems
         | before they hit prod and that the linter throws an error early
         | in the process. It's already easy for them to run locally. So
         | it's not like Deno lint changes anything about the dev user
         | experience, it just changes what DevOps/platform teams have to
         | manage.
        
         | jcheng wrote:
         | Open core can work, but you really have to find very strong
         | product market fit on the proprietary side--ideally with
         | features that discriminate between users who are relatively
         | happy to pay and users who are not. (There's a reason "SSO tax"
         | is so common.)
         | 
         | And you really have to believe in open source and have the
         | discipline to keep investing in it, otherwise the temptation is
         | ever present to throw more and more effort and resources into
         | the proprietary parts.
        
         | Analemma_ wrote:
         | "Become integral enough to the toolchain at OpenAI or Anthropic
         | that they buy you" seems like the new one. Normally I dislike
         | startups built with the intention to be acquihired instead of
         | being a sustainable business, but with open source devtools
         | maybe that's not the worst thing. I'm pretty confident that
         | neither bun nor uv will stop existing anytime soon, and the
         | makers got paydays out of it.
        
       | MuffinFlavored wrote:
       | > What's next for Deno?
       | 
       | Who cares? Why does the world need so many fringe tools/runtimes?
       | So much fragmentation. Why does every project have to be a long-
       | term success? Put some stuff out if its misery. Don't waste the
       | time of the already few open-source contributors who pour hours
       | into something for no good reason.
        
         | steve_adams_86 wrote:
         | Deno is much more than a fringe tool. It's a genuine
         | improvement in many ways.
        
           | MuffinFlavored wrote:
           | The world doesn't need a dozen JS runtimes.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need a dozen JS engines.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need many dozens of Linux distros.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need a handful of BSD distros.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need many dozens of package managers.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need hundreds of JS frameworks.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need dozens of programming languages or
           | chat protocols or CI/CD systems.
           | 
           | The world doesn't need dozens of init systems, service
           | managers, display servers, audio stacks, universal app
           | formats, build tools/bundlers.
           | 
           | Deno may have dragged the JS runtime space forward, fully
           | agree. Maybe it served its purpose and it is time to say
           | goodbye.
        
             | steve_adams_86 wrote:
             | If Deno moved things forward, doesn't that suggest that we
             | do need efforts like this to support ongoing progress?
             | There doesn't seem to be strong evidence to the contrary in
             | the JS ecosystem.
        
             | balamatom wrote:
             | The world doesn't need so many people or anything they have
             | to offer it.
        
         | balamatom wrote:
         | I'd argue that the mainstream, lowest-common-denominator tools
         | are the ones which waste people's time. (Especially when
         | they're backed by an incumbent. Deno, on the other hand,
         | clicked immediately.)
        
       | mohsen1 wrote:
       | Why this person is so mean to someone who gifted Deno and Node to
       | the JS ecosystem? It's not fair. They are trying to build a
       | company on top of open source.
        
         | shimman wrote:
         | Because the model of private capital using open source to make
         | profits is a failure state that we need to get away from.
         | There's no reason why the government can't sponsor open source
         | projects, something tells me the vast majority of open source
         | devs wouldn't mind a system where grants can be reward to
         | projects that the public finds valuable.
         | 
         | That would be much more sustainable than VC rat fucking the
         | commons to make a buck while suckering in devs that were once
         | good community stewards into dry husks that are only formed to
         | generate profit.
        
           | phpnode wrote:
           | Ok but those government grants don't really exist today and
           | what you're arguing for is zero sustainability for open
           | source projects. This is certain to lead to the death of open
           | source - there's not even the reputational pay-off any more
           | if the only real consumer is AI.
        
             | shimman wrote:
             | ah yes the common rebuttal of "but this doesn't exists, so
             | I want the boot to keep stomping on my face. Please don't
             | do anything different! The boot is kinda nice actually now
             | that I sustained enough nerve damage."
             | 
             | Grants are a very effective model of support, it seems to
             | work for entire industries + professions around the world.
             | Even better when there is a body of professionals working
             | democratically to decide which people should be awarded the
             | grants.
             | 
             | Just because you have a failure of imagination doesn't mean
             | others do.
        
               | phpnode wrote:
               | Bad faith reply. The government grants do not exist, it's
               | not a failure of imagination, I too would like to live in
               | that world, but we don't and aren't likely to any time
               | soon. And even if we did, do you think that Deno would
               | have been likely to receive a grant? I do not.
        
           | verdverm wrote:
           | Ideally, the corporations that get immeasurable benefits from
           | open source are a better source for the money. There are
           | multiple ways this can play out, direct payments, putting
           | employees on the project, or contributing their own projects
           | to benefit others.
        
       | furyofantares wrote:
       | > I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I'd spent mastering
       | Deno was a sunk cost. Do I continue building for the runtime, or
       | go back to Node?
       | 
       | I assume the author is aware that Ryan Dahl created that too?
       | 
       | Not that it would make him immune to criticism, but the author
       | comes off extremely petty.
        
       | 0x1ceb00da wrote:
       | They should call the next js runtime "done"
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | I have migrated away from NextJS for similar reasons of being
         | too special case in the ecosystem. Next in particular is
         | designed for the way Vercel runs applications and comes with
         | extra pain if you don't run on edge. (see middleware as an
         | example, I think they renamed it since I left)
        
       | hmokiguess wrote:
       | I could get behind some of this hate directed to Vercel's CEO or
       | even Cursor's, but Deno is sort of like a breath of fresh air
       | around the myriad of parasitic tech out there. Still, why so much
       | hate? Who hurt you? What's going on
        
       | colesantiago wrote:
       | As soon as Deno took money from Sequoia, this was bound to
       | happen.
       | 
       | So here is what is going to happen:
       | 
       | Deno is going to 100% get acquired.
       | 
       | Ryan Dahl is obviously rare talent and any company that gets Ryan
       | would be incredibly lucky.
       | 
       | He has already done a Google Brain Residency so it makes sense
       | for him to go to OpenAI or another AI lab for developing AI
       | agents.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426659
        
       | mattvr wrote:
       | Deno Deploy is actually an excellent product.
       | 
       | My choice ranking is Deno Deploy > Fly.io > AWS for new projects,
       | depending on complexity and needs. They also have a new Deno
       | sandbox feature which is great for running untrusted code, AI
       | agents, etc.
       | 
       | The real question is can they adapt to customer feedback fast
       | enough, focus priorities, adequately market & grow, make it
       | profitable, etc. Bumpy road but definitely not doomed.
       | 
       | [0] https://deno.com/deploy
        
         | steve_adams_86 wrote:
         | I was surprised by the tone about deploy in the blog post too.
         | I think it's excellent. I use it for anything new that uses
         | TypeScript.
        
       | Raed667 wrote:
       | My prediction for 2023 is 2 out 3 (so far)
       | 
       | > Despite the initial hype, Rome tools, Deno & Bun will be quasi
       | abandoned as the ecosystem outpaces their release cycle and the
       | benefits don't merit the headache of migration.
       | 
       | https://blog.raed.dev/posts/predictions_2023
        
         | teg4n_ wrote:
         | Rome tools is now Biome and Biome is really good. The company
         | didn't work out but the tool itself is better than ever.
        
         | morphology wrote:
         | I defaulted to Biome for all greenfield projects a year ago,
         | and at this point you would have to drag me kicking and
         | screaming back to ESLint and Prettier. I also defaulted to Bun
         | and still think Bun is leagues better than Node.js but I now
         | have my doubts about its future after seeing the OpenCode devs
         | consciously minimize their dependency on Bun for strategic
         | reasons.
        
         | pier25 wrote:
         | Deno hasn't been abandoned though. The company still survives.
         | These layoffs are probably to focus resources on the runtime
         | and subhosting product.
         | 
         | Bun is in much better shape than it was in 2023 and its future
         | is less uncertain today than it was back then.
        
       | neom wrote:
       | I won't speak for Ryan, but these last 7/8 months have been extra
       | extra hard for me with Mikeal dying, and at least, Ryan was as
       | close to Mikeal as I was, so I'd guess it's been a hard time for
       | him too. Being ambitious and taking on a lot is always... a lot,
       | and he's been at it with Oracle as well. It doesn't get any
       | easier the older you get, to be honest. Cut him some slack eh?
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | Oracle looks to me a distraction, that isn't what is going to
         | bring users into Deno.
         | 
         | For the rest, I can't comment on, all the best.
        
           | neom wrote:
           | Thanks. Sure, it may have indeed become a distraction, maybe
           | it always was... I don't know. Never the less, he is
           | finishing what he started, and that is admirable.
           | https://dev.ua/en/news/tvorets-nodejs-zbyraie-1758280906 -
           | https://www.devclass.com/development/2022/09/05/nodejs-
           | creat...
        
         | latchkey wrote:
         | RIP Mikeal. I'm sorry for your loss.
        
         | ignoramous wrote:
         | > _I won 't speak for Ryan... Mikeal dying_
         | 
         | For those out of loop: https://github.com/mikeal/cancer-diaries
         | 
         | Ryan tweeted he was "crushed" when Mikael died:
         | https://x.com/rough__sea/status/1932667147605717130
        
       | jeremyscanvic wrote:
       | Like other commenters the tone of this post threw me off but I
       | was really impressed by the design of the website. Congrats for
       | building it, it shows your hard work and taste!
        
       | dgreensp wrote:
       | I find the irreverent tone refreshing, personally.
       | 
       | As a founder who built all my prototypes and side projects on
       | Deno for two years, I personally think Deno's execution was just
       | horrible, and avoidably so. Head-scratchingly, bafflingly bad
       | decision-making.
       | 
       | I was the first engineering hire at Meteor (2012-2016), and we
       | made the mistake of thinking we could reinvent the whole app
       | development ecosystem, and make money at it, so I have the
       | benefit of that experience, but it is not really rocket science
       | or some insight that I wouldn't expect Ryan Dahl and team to
       | have, in the 2020s.
       | 
       | They were stretched thin with too many projects, which they were
       | always neglecting or rewriting, without a solid business case.
       | They coupled together runtime, framework, linting, docs, hosting,
       | and packaging, with almost all of these components being inferior
       | to the usual tools. The package system became an absolute
       | nightmare.
       | 
       | If the goal was to eventually replace Node and NPM with something
       | where TypeScript was first-class, there was better security, etc,
       | they could have done a classic "embrace and extend."
        
       | thinkingkong wrote:
       | It's easy to be critical in hindsight but honestly when Deno
       | first came out it was pretty incredible. Even the whole idea
       | about URL based imports makes lots of sense but it was
       | incompatible with any of the existing toolchains that were wildly
       | popular. At the same time, companies like Vercel launched a new
       | kind of framework and leveraged that into a hosting business with
       | I would say great success. They captured developers where they
       | were at _today_, including acknowledging the demographics, the
       | tools, the culture, etc.
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | Compatibility aside, Url-based imports are a bad idea as soon
         | as you go beyond writing your entire program in a single source
         | file and want to keep imported versions of common dependencies
         | in sync. It's nice for scripts, but a deno.json file is better.
        
       | mrcwinn wrote:
       | What nonsense. Does it count as a "clapback" when the CEO
       | responds sensibly and takes responsibility? This is just
       | pointless snark.
        
       | zoogeny wrote:
       | I have always wanted Deno to succeed. But it just seems to be too
       | full of contradictions.
       | 
       | Their initial baffling stance about package.json was the first
       | bad sign. I almost can't imagine the hubris of expecting devs to
       | abandon such a large eco-system of packages by not striving for
       | 100% support out of the gate. Of course they had to relent, but
       | honestly the damage was done. They chose ideology over
       | practicality and that doesn't bode well with devs.
       | 
       | I think they saw Rust and thought that devs were willing to
       | abandon C++ for a language that was more modern and secure. By
       | touting these same benefits perhaps they were hoping for similar
       | sentiment from the JavaScript community.
       | 
       | Deno has some really good ideas (e.g. the library KV interface).
       | I agree with a lot (but not all) of Dahl's vision. But the whole
       | thing is just a bit too quirky for me to invest anything critical
       | into an ecosystem that is one funding round away from
       | disappearing completely.
        
       | Sophira wrote:
       | Before yt-dlp started recommending Deno as its JavaScript
       | runtime, I had no idea it even existed.
       | 
       | Since then, I know that it's there and that it's more secure than
       | Node in some applications, and I can see using it being a good
       | option. But it sounds like it might be too little too late? Going
       | by this article, at least.
        
         | cluckindan wrote:
         | yt-dlp was definitely the reason for the increased adoption
         | mentioned in the post.
         | 
         | I wonder if the layoffs have a deeper connection to yt-dlp.
        
         | muppetman wrote:
         | Same, I remember googling Deno and going "Oh this new thing
         | looks neat" - and then I haven't heard/seen/read a thing about
         | it until this post. But I keep hearing about Bun and of course
         | nodejs.
         | 
         | Feel bad for them, they obviously just didn't capture a real
         | userbase. I expect if yt-dlp hadn't started to require it
         | they'd have just silently flamed out.
        
       | fnord77 wrote:
       | > The harsh truth is that Deno's offerings have failed to capture
       | developers' attention. I can't pretend to know why -- I was a
       | fanboy myself -- but far too few devs care about Deno.
       | 
       | I never heard of Deno until today. So perhaps this was a
       | marketing failure.
        
       | IshKebab wrote:
       | I really hope this is premature because Deno is easily the best
       | thing to happen to the JS/TS ecosystem in years.
       | 
       | I agree with all the comments saying this is unnecessarily
       | critical. We're getting an amazing tool totally for free. Quit
       | complaining.
       | 
       | I would not be surprised if they get bought by one of the big AI
       | players anyway, given the weird purchases of Bun and Astral.
        
       | hedayet wrote:
       | > Idle speculation has led to baseless rumours of an OpenAI
       | acquisition. I'm not convinced that makes sense but neither does
       | the entire AI industry.
       | 
       | hmm, blog author doesn't know about Anthropic's Bun acquisition,
       | and consequently shouldn't comment on "the entire AI industry"
        
       | hollowturtle wrote:
       | I had the feeling something wasn't going well as soon as the AI
       | pivoting. My guess was that for Ryan being acquired like Bun was
       | might have been the only road available
        
       | ashwinnair99 wrote:
       | Deno always felt like something built for the right reasons but
       | at the wrong time. Good tech losing isn't new, it's just always a
       | bit sad when it happens slowly.
        
         | Chyzwar wrote:
         | No, they made many wrong architecture decisions that made it
         | fringe project rather than mainstream. You could glimpse on how
         | things could played out by looking into bun.js adoption.
        
       | pragmatic wrote:
       | Is Deno a classic second system syndrome project?
       | 
       | Seems so. All the breaks from the first system in the name of
       | "we're doing it right this time" probably killed the momentum.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
       | 
       | Even the best and brightest of us are still human.
        
       | babaganoosh89 wrote:
       | Truth of the matter is Ryan Dahl is a suboptimal CEO. Being able
       | to build good open source software does not have a strong
       | correlation with being able to build a successful business.
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | > I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I'd spent mastering
       | Deno was a sunk cost
       | 
       |  _Hundreds_ of hours? I 'm sorry but if you truly needed that
       | much time to find your way around an incredibly straightforward
       | runtime that's on you. Skills for Deno, Node.js, Bun, Cloudflare
       | Workers, browser-based JS and all the rest are like 99%
       | transferable. If Deno doesn't work for you then use something
       | else. It would probably be simpler to switch than writing all
       | these aggressive blog posts.
        
         | balamatom wrote:
         | The one that wasted me hundreds of hours was TypeScript on Node
         | with ESM. The most common, familiar, boring stuff which
         | everyone is intimately familiar with, right?
         | 
         | Got shanghaied into TS-land right around Node 16 when they and
         | TypeScript imposed mutually incompatible handling of ESM
         | modules (that extensions mess).
         | 
         | Not only the type checker fail to understand of the kind of JS
         | I had been shipping (and testing, and documenting, and
         | communicating) up to that point; both the immediate toolchain,
         | and _people 's whole pattern language around the toolset_, were
         | entirely broken as soon as you were doing anything different
         | from the kind of React.js that later became Vercel.
         | 
         | Not only I was able to do 10% of what I was able to do
         | previously conditional on jury-rigging the billion dollar stack
         | to work, I also had a little cadre of happy campers on my ass
         | blatantly gaslighting me that it is all, in fact, working; and
         | suggesting the most inane "solutions" once I'd bent over
         | backwards to demonstrate how there is, indeed, a problem of
         | absurd dimensions, straight outta nowhere.
         | 
         | Later I met more such people. Same people who would insist JS
         | runtimes are not trivially interchangeable, having committed to
         | not examine what they're doing beyond a meager level of
         | abstraction.
         | 
         | I see it as a rather perverse form of "working to spec" (have
         | had to pick up surreal amounts of slack after such characters),
         | but with incentives being what they are you get a cutthroat
         | environment (such as the author of this blog post imagines to
         | be living in), and from a cutthroat environment you get the
         | LLMs eating everyone's breakfasts -- because no matter how
         | yucky a word "synergy" is, synergizin' is that "fake open
         | source" is designed to preclude, throughout the JS ecosystem.
         | 
         | "Fake open source" is how I call MIT/BSD licensed devtools and
         | frameworks from hyperscalers that don't need to do an opencore
         | rugpull because they're a piece of a long-term ecosystem
         | strategy. They benefit from immense decade-long marketing and
         | astroturfing efforts, lending them "default status" in the
         | mindshare; and ultimately serve to carry the vendor's preferred
         | version of reality into unrelated downstream projects. Which is
         | why they often spectacularly fail to respond to the community's
         | needs: they are built to preclude, past a certain point, the
         | empowerment of implementors as a community.
         | 
         | Mastering some of that _shit_ , now there was a sunk cost for
         | me, but in modern JS land all these churning agglomerations
         | play the role of "pay to play" gatekeepers. Considering what
         | that's made the playing field be like, I'm happy pivoting to
         | more niche technology just to keep away from said churning
         | agglomerations.
        
       | shepherdjerred wrote:
       | I was really into Deno until it went all-in on nodejs
       | compatibility (like Bun).
       | 
       | At that point I was left wondering -- if Bun and Deno have
       | essentially the same strategy/approach, why would I pick the less
       | mature option?
       | 
       | And so I ported everything to Bun
        
       | ozten wrote:
       | For me Bun's dramatic entrance and the a lack of any Deno
       | response that reached my attention effectively evaporated any
       | interest I would have in switching my runtime. I'm already set
       | with my tooling and hosting.
        
       | nektro wrote:
       | i did not interpret this article as hate. this is very sad news
       | and OP is being honest about the state of things and failings
       | along the way. they even end with a plea that things turn around.
        
       | asim wrote:
       | Come on man. This stuff is hard. I was the guy on the other side
       | writing these BS hit pieces. Then I raised funding and took a
       | shot. It's so hard. It's like pushing a boulder up a mountain
       | except you're expected to build a rocket ship on the way and
       | blast off. It's not the analogy of falling off a cliff and
       | building the rocket on the way down. Sure death is on the horizon
       | and you can manage it, but the pressures are immense and so much
       | of it you can't game. Initial hype is intoxicating and you might
       | even have something of value but real business takes time. It's a
       | boulder up a hill and you need to bring a lot of good people
       | along the way to help you. OpenAI was 7 years of nothing working
       | then boom. I hit 7 years and fatigue set in, but also life, I
       | wasn't that same guy who started at 30. Give these people a
       | break. Ryan has done great things with Node and Deno. Give him a
       | break. Don't stomp on the guy. Give him some kudos. Help him FFS.
       | Don't trash him. Shame honestly. Ryan keep up the great work.
       | It's hard. Deno team, it's the effort and intention that counts.
       | Good work. Regroup, try again.
        
         | scubbo wrote:
         | No-one who accepts investor money deserves any sympathy.
        
           | MainlyMortal wrote:
           | You're literally on a VC forum.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | The problem Deno faces is that nodejs is "good enough".
       | 
       | Pray you never have a "good enough" competitor.
       | 
       | I felt it should have aimed to be a 100% drop in replacement for
       | nodejs then innovated on top of that.
        
       | lloydatkinson wrote:
       | I'm starting to think this guys obsession with writing hit pieces
       | about Deno is not at all genuine and perhaps he is being paid.
        
       | arikrahman wrote:
       | Anthropic's acquisition might prove for the better if their able
       | to avoid the same layoff situation.
        
       | jklmnopqrstuvw wrote:
       | I think the only real perk of Bun/Deno over Node is that they can
       | run .ts directly and have better ES compatibility. I don't need
       | Deno's permission system, but it's on by default, so I went with
       | Bun.
        
       | pier25 wrote:
       | > _Bun has far more bugs and compatibility issues than anyone
       | will admit. Node still has too much friction around TypeScript
       | and ECMAScript modules._
       | 
       | I only use deps that support Bun like Hono and Drizzle but so far
       | my experience has been flawless.
       | 
       | And yeah Node sucks for TS in comparison to Deno or Bun.
        
       | barrrrald wrote:
       | Who hurt you?
        
       | pier25 wrote:
       | The idea of Deno is brilliant... but they should have either
       | focused on Node compat from the first day (like Bun did) or just
       | keep doing their own thing with built-in APIs to solve the most
       | common needs (db drivers, router, s3, etc).
       | 
       | They had the right ideas but it's like investors panicked midway
       | and demanded a change in direction.
        
       | hluska wrote:
       | This is an absolutely horrible article. From totally over the top
       | comparisons to an absolute lack of substance, this is no more
       | than a collection of 'haha me smart' garbage mixed with personal
       | attacks.
       | 
       | Drunk sports fans are more coherent than this.
        
       | jaccola wrote:
       | The author should be the change they want to see in the world.
       | Nothing is stopping them from making an alternative.
       | > "I could continue but it would just be cruel to dissect
       | further."
       | 
       | in particular really rubbed me the wrong way for 2 reasons:
       | 
       | 1) You acknowledge that you think you've already at least
       | bordered on "cruel", why would you want this? It's not clever.
       | 
       | 2) You have the arrogance to think your opinion means this much
       | to the creator when they've achieved far more than you.
        
       | MOSI3 wrote:
       | "Decimation" is to reduce by a tenth (and typically those being
       | reduced would be forced to decide who to lose), so a poor
       | comparison to "losing half your staff". If you're going to
       | mention its Roman origins, then these details matter.
        
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