Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, has joined Cloudflare after the company acquired his Deno startup. Cloudflare will keep Deno alive with bug fixes and security patches for another year, then end development. Dahl told The Register that choosing Node.js for building servers is now "doing it wrong," pointing instead to Cloudflare's Workers model.
Deno was Dahl's 2018 rewrite of Node, offering built-in fetch, a permission model, and native TypeScript support. Despite 400,000 monthly users and Sequoia backing, it never escaped Node's gravity. Dahl admitted that Deno had to become more Node-compatible over time, leaving it as an alternative Node implementation rather than a true replacement.
At Cloudflare, Dahl's team will merge his open-source celld project—an implementation of Durable Objects—with workerd, Cloudflare's open-source Workers runtime. The goal is a standalone JavaScript/WebAssembly runtime that can run anywhere, with distributed state. Such a runtime would use only about 300 KB of memory per instance, compared with hundreds of megabytes for Node or Deno, a difference that could matter greatly for cloud providers and agentic workloads. Both Deno and celld are being discontinued as this work proceeds.