Deno Joins Cloudflare

Today’s issue: Luke Karrys makes up a new word, generator-induced migraines, and the elaborate ploy to save auth company IPOs.

Welcome to #528.

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Deno Joins Cloudflare

I woke up this morning ready to do the mental gymnastics necessary to write a story about Theo’s $420k TypeScript slopfork, so when I saw Cloudflare announce that they are acquiring Deno, my first thought was THANK G*SH.

My second thought was, did we call this? Back in August when Ry released his project celld, we made the observation that this was a not-so-subtle message in a bottle asking for Cloudflare to acquire Deno. And it turns out we were right… finally.

Why now? Like the rest of the ZIRP-era VC-backed open-source projects, Deno was burning cash with little to no hope of raising another round of funding, so they had to find a buyer. Fortunately, Cloudflare also had a problem to solve. They needed a better off-ramp for their platform to stop scaring away enterprise customers who were wary of vendor lock-in.

But as much as we’re happy for Ry, Bert and co, none of us are getting any Cloudflare stock. So what are we all getting out of this deal?

What developers can expect moving forward:

• A workerd Rust rewrite: workerd, the open-source runtime that powers Cloudflare’s Workers platform, is getting rewritten in Rust. Is this a good thing? “Who cares it’s Rust!” - DHH (probably).

• A Durable Object escape hatch: celld accomplished what Cloudflare has struggled to do up to this point, which was to make the Durable Object primitive self-hostable. Ry and Bert’s main objective is to continue to build “first-class” support for self-hosting workerd.

• A future for Deno (the runtime): Despite being open source, the majority of the contributions to the project have been made by Deno (the company) employees. With this acquisition, we no longer need to ask whether the runtime can transition to being a community-led effort… at least for the next year.

Bottom line: The only metric that really matters is shots on goal. If you’re us, it might take you 1000 hot takes to finally nail a prediction, or if you’re Ry, a single love letter to secure the partner of your dreams. Either way, shoot your shot, fellas (and ladies).

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1. Luke Karrys wrote about how vlt.io serves 70% less package metadata than npmjs.org. I’m also 90% sure Luke made up the word “packument” but it’s apparently why your package downloads are so bloated.

2. Armin Ronacher wrote a blog post to help you understand codemode, a way to orchestrate MCP tools that saves you tokens, gives your agents “freedom of expression”, and is somehow yet another thing Kenton Varda invented. Pi acquisition loading?

3. Blacksmith is a drop-in replacement for GitHub runners that’s significantly faster and costs 60% less. It’s dead simple and also fully observable in your CI pipeline. [sponsored]

4. William Candillon just released React Native Skia v3, which includes a shiny new GPU backend to make those cross-platform graphics go brrr.

5. The Next.js team is introducing a new programming model that “addresses many of the frustrations you’ve had with App Router from the start” with the release of Next 16.4. The fix, another directive called use cache 🫠.

6. Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor wrote a new protocol for personal agents that is built on top of OAuth. Is this an elaborate ploy to help all the struggling auth companies finally IPO?

7. Give your apps and AI agents real-time data from 100+ search engines using SerpApi. Power your AI tools, track rankings, or discover local businesses with real-time results from Google Search, Maps, AI Overviews, and more. Get structured JSON or Markdown with one simple GET request. [sponsored]

8. Lucas Bonomi created a new language called gss (GPU style sheets) that lets you write shaders using CSS 🤯.

9. Max Barvian wrote a little React trick to help you improve your exit animations.

10. Dev Agrawal created solid-yield which lets you use generator functions in your Solid.js apps where every read is a yield*. If you are using Solid.js and don’t get a raging migraine from generator syntax, you might like this.