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Comment by taikon | Hacker News Reader

Why would they acquire them then shut it down? Is there a reason for that?

Fundamentally this acquisition is not about Deno the open source project. It’s about buying an amazing team that has built a self-hosted version of Cloudflare Workers that actually doesn’t suck. And that is all about commoditizing the complement.

Deno built celld, which implements the Workers and Durable Objects programming model with self-hosting in mind. Cloudflare says its own distributed infrastructure is too complicated for straightforward self-hosting, and it hadn’t successfully solved that problem. For customers who might be reluctant to commit to being locked in to Cloudflare’s infrastructure, having a rock solid self-hosted alternative reduces that reluctance.

I wonder how easily could you port celld to Node.js?

I'm still learning the project, but from what I read so far, there is no need. `celld` is not tied to Deno. `celld` handles the interface with v8 directly via `rusty_v8`, which they mention will keep being supported. So, Node, Deno and celld all share the same engine already.

What we will probably see in the next few months is a major version of `workerd` which is a rebranded celld with better Cloudflare support. And then a bunch of improvements in further versions. While I think `celld` is a nicer name it makes sense to keep the official Cloudflare product/solution as `workerd`.

I hope the developer experience gets closer to Deno, I'm no fan of setting up all the required Node tooling for proper TypeScript support. I really like Deno. RIP

Acquihire - they’re acquiring it for the team behind it to eventually develop proprietary software

> develop proprietary software

This is a weird strategy to stake future IP value on in the age of AI. With competent and fully qualified team, anyone should be able to reverse engineer this idea and build a roadmap for their own implementation. Especially in the world of open source.

Do you really think someone off the street, armed with Opus 5.5 could recreate Deno? Or would you pull Cloudflare people off what they were doing (meaning it's a very inefficient company) to work on this?

At the end of the day, great engineers armed with great tools are going to outperform anyone who just has the great tools.

1. They can gain at least a temporary advantage by using a proprietary version. They'll have the original devs who can continue where they were before. 2. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with a situation where LLM-based copyright laundering becomes illegal/enforced, but only in favor of large corporations' copyright, in which case they could maintain the advantage

What would they miss out on? A bunch of PRslop? The "open source community" is now dead.

Hopefully not to stop celld, the cloudflare Durable Object compatible impl. https://github.com/denoland/celld https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185430

Phrased as it being merged into the existing, but I can't help but fret a bit. Is cloudflare willing to let their own core compute product be something available to the world? Absolutely sick wins if so. But I worry celld pretty reasonably seen as a threat.

read the Cloudflare post, basically the opposite of that: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/

To quote Game of Thrones, words are wind.

workerd is really far from production-ready Workers replacement, and seems to be very specifically scoped in such a way that essential parts of why Cloudflare dares to run it are not included in the bundle.

I'm not really sure what you mean here.

My best guess is you're talking about sandboxing, specifically how we defend ourselves against malicious tenants. Indeed, a lot of how we defend against that is not in workerd, and fundamentally can't be, because it's more than just some code, it's a process requiring active management.

However, you only need that if you have untrusted tenants.

If you are using workerd to self-host your own applications on non-Cloudflare infrastructure, then this isn't a concern for you. You don't have untrusted tenants.

If you are hosting untrusted tenants, then you can put workerd in a micro VM, the same as you'd do with any other popular runtime.

And it's in your interest for workerd to never include all such things..

I am again not sure what you are getting at.

My best guess is that you are suggesting that we should open source our multi-tenant hosting technology, along with workerd.

But this doesn't make sense. No popular JavaScript runtime includes multi-tenant hosting technology. Multi-tenant hosting is the responsibility of the hosting provider. workerd is compatible with other providers' multi-tenant hosting approaches. You do not need our specific technology in order to run Workers apps on other hosting providers, and in fact would not even be particularly useful for that purpose.

Yet this is something that was plausibly in the roadmap for Celld.

Why would you expect that, when Deno Deploy was not open source?

(But I admittedly have not actually asked Ryan if he had long-term plans to add a multi-tenant scheduler so maybe I'm wrong.)

acqui-hire

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