Bun's adoption rate (because of its NPM compatibility) was the forcing function; not VC funding. Deno could pursue a slow-and-steady better-will-win approach vs. Node until another runtime competitor appeared with a more seamless node integration. In fact, the VC funding is what made the slow-but-steady strategy possible in the first place.
replyStrong disagree. Deno could have been a cheaply run open source project with corporate sponsors and could have pursued the slow and steady approach. There's no reason to feel pressure from competitors unless you want to if you're forging a genuinely new path. "Clean break from Node" was the differentiator. Once they abandoned that the reason for using it went away.
replyThe moment they took on VC funding they had to care about competitors and also had to move away from the framework to things like Deno Deploy in pursuit of money.
I doubt deno could have funded its development purely from sponsorship. And Deploy generated real revenue (on its OEM/b2b side).
replyJt is interesting to speculate on what might have been had Deno never been a profit-seeking company. But having worked there, I am reasonably confident in my assessment above.
I agree that should it need to be profit making then what’s e got makes sense. But hey, Node isn’t a profit making enterprise. Deno could have been the same.
replyI only tangentially followed Deno, but am a proud Deno 1 hoodie-haver!
replyA compatibility shim sounds like a great community run project while the core team could work on the slow-but-steady w/o concerning the core with too much burden of node compat.
Deno is now a feedstock for future JS runtimes.
They basically gave up the day they decided to become npm compatible. That was the day Deno died.
replyThat’s the day I switched to Bun
replyYet Bun has Node compatibility.
replyProbably because node imcompat / fresh start wasn't the only key differentiator for them?? Bun also had/has (in context of a leg up over node and similar to deno):
reply- typescript support - built in linting - built in package manager command - built in transpiler/bundler
Presumably they like other aspects of Bun, in a world where a clean API is not an option.
replyEnshittification is inevitable once a company takes VC funding
replyThat's the correct answer, the rest is cope.
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