Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the Deno runtime. Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, said the company will use the acquisition to improve its Workers programming model and platform, which lets customers build and run software on Cloudflare's network.
Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, who also created Node.js. The startup recently released celld, an open-source implementation of Workers. Varda said celld "delighted" Cloudflare's team, and he pushed back against the theory that Cloudflare made Workers incompatible with other platforms to create lock-in, arguing that being open source and offering an escape hatch is good business.
Dahl said his team is "joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers." The companies did not disclose financial terms. Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia.