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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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"
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.
Seriously imagine running a company like Deno, giving away most of your work for free, lots of shit not going right at all, gotta make hard decisions, fire good people etc, only to find some asshole call you out personally for... for not writing a blog post fast enough? The entitlement is through the roof here.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would something else that wasn't a VC-funded startup really work better? The technical problem seems fundamental.
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.
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...
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.
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.
JavaScript on the server goes all the way back to Netscape days with LiveWire.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, on top of that bringing in social media politics into it is weird, makes it hard to take this as pure/useful criticism
Given the footer of the blog I’m not surprised the author really enjoys the smell of his own farts.
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."
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.
at a practical level that word hasn't meant "one in ten" for like, decades. probably just need to get used to it.
Some businesses don't need to be VC backed though.
That is the problem.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
> 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?
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
If Robin Hood was CEO presiding over a hierarchy of wage workers, with VC backing to shoot for unicorn status
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.
> 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"
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.
OSI is a plague and many people here swear by it blindly. They hate the big hyperscalers but play right into their arms.
To the point with exception of Emacs, GCC and the Linux kernel, we can assert the GPL is dead for most practical purposes.
Seriously imagine running a company like Deno, giving away most of your work for free, lots of shit not going right at all, gotta make hard decisions, fire good people etc, only to find some asshole call you out personally for... for not writing a blog post fast enough? The entitlement is through the roof here.
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?
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.
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...
RIP Mikeal. I'm sorry for your loss.
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.
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.
> He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out
Whose fault is that?
Has any competitor copied anything from Deno?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> Support maybe?
LLMs seem likely to kill or at least vastly weaken the support model.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
> 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"
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.
In this case I think the reference implementation was created by one of the deno founders.
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.
Well, indeed. History is full of zero-hitters, with a few nonzero hit-wonders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Rome tools is now Biome and Biome is really good. The company didn't work out but the tool itself is better than ever.
What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime? What to they pitch to the early investors even?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Hosting (Deno Deploy), https://deno.com/deploy/pricing
Wait until a big company buy them. That seems not to happen.
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.
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
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.
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!
I'm afraid something like that could happen to bun.
Anthropic acquired Bun, so money should not be a problem for the next couple of years.
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/anthropic-g...
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?
the sky is falling...
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.
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.
> 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.
Does any of this transfer over to Bun as well?
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.
Definitely, as it depends on where Zig goes, and what Antrophic will make out of it.
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.
For me yes, I have never found these alternative runtimes appealing.
However Anthropic owns Bun now, so a different story will unfold.
They should call the next js runtime "done"
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)
> 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.
What nonsense. Does it count as a “clapback” when the CEO responds sensibly and takes responsibility? This is just pointless snark.
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
> 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.
Deno is much more than a fringe tool. It's a genuine improvement in many ways.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
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.
Couldn’t you make a pseudo monorepo via git submodules?
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.
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...)
Submodules are pain, use the dependency management systems for the languages in your monorepo.
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.
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.
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.