Cloudflare said Oct. 9 it has acquired Deno, the JavaScript runtime built by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, to fold the startup's celld technology into its Workers platform, according to TechCrunch and Simon Willison's blog.
Cloudflare is after celld, not the Deno runtime itself. Celld is a Rust binary Deno released in August that runs Workers and Durable Objects across machines using object storage as its main external dependency, Willison wrote. Cloudflare plans to merge ideas from celld into workerd, its own Workers runtime, to make self-hosting a first-class option.
Dahl, who will lead the merged effort alongside Deno co-founder Bert Belder, wrote on Hacker News that he no longer believes Deno is "where I can do the most important work" and called celld "an entirely new model for server development," according to Willison's post.
Cloudflare will keep shipping monthly bug fixes and security patches for the open-source Deno runtime for 12 months before ending development, and Deno Deploy, the hosted service, shuts down in six months, TechCrunch and Willison both reported. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Workers currently requires Cloudflare's own infrastructure to run. If celld's object storage approach reaches workerd, teams could self-host the same programming model on their own servers, which matters to any team that has avoided Workers specifically over platform lock-in.