Hacker News

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.

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.

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 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.”

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime? What to they pitch to the early investors even?

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.

Anthropic's acquisition might prove for the better if their able to avoid the same layoff situation.

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

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.

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.

> 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"

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 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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

They should call the next js runtime "done"

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.

Does any of this transfer over to Bun as well?

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 nonsense. Does it count as a “clapback” when the CEO responds sensibly and takes responsibility? This is just pointless snark.

> 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.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

> 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.

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.

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