I wrote about Deno’s decline a few months ago: I wish Deno would keep doing what it does best. I shared its vision, but I think it never got far because a startup was the one carrying it out. This decision makes me more sure of that.

It also settles something for me. From now on I won’t trust a development platform built by a startup, however good the vision. Too risky, too easy to get betrayed.

What I’d rather see is people with strong ideas about development platforms letting go of the impatience and building them as community-driven F/OSS projects instead. Funding is the obstacle, of course. I hope good F/OSS funds like NLnet and the Sovereign Tech Fund keep expanding.

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I wrote about a neighboring angle back in June: I wish Deno would keep doing what it does best. I still build most of my libraries Deno-first, so I haven’t landed where the author did, but I share the worry.

My argument is that each step toward Node.js compatibility (npm: specifiers, node_modules, node:*) gives library authors one less reason to target Deno specifically, the way Windows compatibility did for OS/2. Node.js, meanwhile, has been picking up Deno’s ideas: native TypeScript, a permission model, fetch(). I also suspect the VC clock explains some of the rush, though from the outside I can’t tell a product decision from a runway decision.

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