Cloudflare announced on Friday its decision to acquire Deno, the startup responsible for the eponymous programming runtime. According to hinews, Kenton Varda of Cloudflare stated that this acquisition aims to enhance the company’s Workers programming model and platform, which enables clients to develop and execute software on Cloudflare’s network. Varda serves as the principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers.
Deno, co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, recently introduced celld, an open-source implementation of Workers, which Varda noted has “delighted” the Cloudflare team. Varda contended that, contrary to “a popular theory” suggesting that the company designed Cloudflare Workers to function differently from other cloud platforms to create a sense of ‘lock-in,’ Cloudflare believes that “being open source and providing an escape hatch is good business.” Meanwhile, Dahl expressed that his team is “joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.” The financial details of the acquisition remain undisclosed. Deno has secured a total of $26 million in funding, including a Series A round led by Sequoia.
