Node.js creator ditches Deno to work on open source Cloudflare Workers

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl is sacrificing a battle to win the war … for server-side computing and allowing Node-replacement Deno to fall by the wayside.

Last week, Cloudflare announced that it had purchased Dahl’s company Deno, which was built around an open source server-side JavaScript runtime of the same name that he created, to compete with the Node.js runtime, which he also created.

Nonetheless, Deno has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its development.

That’s OK with Dahl.

"I am now of the opinion that if you're choosing Node.js for building servers, you’re doing it wrong," Dahl told The Register.

For Cloudflare, the Deno buy is an acquihire for Dahl and 12 of his Deno colleagues, who will work to build out Cloudflare’s Workers platform, expanding it for potential open-source use.

He feels this approach is the way to go.

“Right now, every other server is really operating at the Linux VM layer.

That is not what Cloudflare Workers are," he said.

The unstoppable force of Node.js Dahl’s Node.js, which he presented to the world in 2009, sparked a revolution in Web application architecture.

He was fed up with the Apache web server hogging all the memory.

Using the Google V8 JavaScript engine, Node not only could execute JavaScript code on the server, but it could concurrently serve thousands of requests per second with a fraction of the memory required by the traditional choice of the time, Apache Web server.

Today, Node powers about 30 million websites worldwide.

With 130 million downloads, it probably runs a lot more internal operations as well.