Another JS runtime just got acquired... but this one is getting killed
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0:00–0:25Last week, the JavaScript runtime wars officially ended when the guy who put JavaScript on the server and then spent the next decade atoning for it announced that his company Dino was joining Cloudflare. And on paper, it looks like a pretty traditional Silicon Valley acquisition where the founder says they're excited for the future. The company says they're excited about the mission and the employees learn the hard way what a Pruff Stack is. But if you think about it, it's a little weird that a company which already has its own
Structure
Last week, the JavaScript runtime wars officially ended when the guy who put JavaScript on the server and then spent the next decade atoning for it announced that his company Dino was joining Cloudflare. And on paper, it looks like a pretty traditional Silicon Valley acquisition where the founder says they're excited for the future. The company says they're excited about the mission and the employees learn the hard way what a Pruff Stack is. But if you think about it, it's a little weird that a company which already has its own runtime and deployment platform would buy a worse one. In today's video, we'll find out what Cloudflare actually paid for, learn why Ryan Doll now thinks re-implementing Node was a bad idea, and dive into what the future of Dino looks like now. And spoiler alert, it's not so good. It is October 15th, 2026, and you're watching the code report. Back in 2009, Ryan Doll got on stage at JSCOM EU and introduced the world to a new open- source runtime called Node.js that allowed you to write JavaScript on the server. Nine years later, he went back to that same stage with a talk titled 10 things I regret about Node, where he spent most of the time tearing apart the original project before revealing that he recreated it from scratch, but this time without all the regret. He called it Dino and unlike Node, it came with its own formatter, llinter, and testrunner that supported TypeScript, was secure by default, and had a sensible way to manage external packages. Adino 1.0 0 launched a few years later in 2020 and by 2021 Ryan announced their serverless platform Dino Deploy along with a fresh $5 million seed round and initially things were going great and Netlefi and Superbase
Watch from 0:00built their edge functions on top of Dino and Slack used it to power their new app platform. The next year in 2022 they got 21 million in series A funding from Sequoia launched a web framework called Fresh and it was looking like they had a real shot at becoming the future of serverside JavaScript. But then their momentum died. Their biggest problem being that Node didn't just roll over. During those same few years, Node added fetch, a permission model, and the ability to run TypeScript files directly. So, Dino lost its edge. Meanwhile, the products that were supposed to make money weren't gaining enough traction to justify the valuation. Adino Deploy went from 35 regions down to six. Dino KV launched in 2023 and never made it out of beta. And Fresh started going months between releases. At the same time, Ryan took on a legal fight with Oracle over the JavaScript trademark, which Oracle inherited when it bought Sun Microsystems the same year Ryan created Node. It was a noble cause, but a GoFundMe for trademark lawyers probably isn't what Sequoia had in mind when they wrote a $21 million check. The sentiment got bad enough last year that a developer named David Bushell wrote a blog post declaring that Dena was basically dead since every new release was just more node compatibility fixes in an endless game of ketchup. And ironically, Ryan had come to the same conclusion. He just took a little bit longer to get there. So earlier this year, the team started to look at hard problems that live outside the runtime, like spreading compute across machines, coordinating state, and scaling. And the best answer they found was Cloudflare's durable objects, which if you're not familiar with are basically tiny
Watch from 1:30singlethreaded servers that each get their own private SQLite database and the ability to hold websocket connections. But the problem with durable objects is that they really only work on Cloudflare. So in August, the Dino team released their own version they called cell D, which lets you run durable objects on your own servers at a fraction of the cost. And surprisingly, Cloudflare was happy to be ripped off like this. In the announcement post, the creator of Cloudflare Workers said that people have always accused Cloudflare of using workers to lock in developers, but the workers runtime has been open source since 2022 and that they've wanted to build a self-hostable version for years, but just never got around to it. He even admitted he tried building one himself last spring and he couldn't get it to work. So, when the Dino team figured it out with Cell D, Cloudflare did what anyone with a $123 billion market cap would do and they just bought the whole company. The plan is to have Ryan and co-founder Bert Belder merge celld into Cloudflare's open- source workers runtime is so that anyone can run workers and durable objects on their own servers with official support from Cloudflare. And because we can't go a whole video without talking about it, Ryan says the big focus is AI agents because durable objects are a natural fit for agents that need cheap compute, persistent state, and real-time connections. But unfortunately, if you're using any Dino product that isn't CLD, you are screwed. Cloudflare says they'll only continue to ship bug fixes and security patches for Dino for the next year. But after that, they'll stop development altogether. And if you're using Dino deploy today, you have about 6 months to migrate. So in the end, with Anthropic acquiring Bun and Cloudflare
Watch from 3:01buying Dino after it bought V back in June, the only major JavaScript runtime that isn't owned by a company with a cloud is Node, the one Ryan spent the last 8 years trying to replace. So if you're one of the Dino developers needing to migrate, you can at least make the move a little cheaper with Jet Brains. the sponsor of today's video. Thanks to my childhood financial trauma, every time I ask my coding agent to do anything, my brain starts compulsively calculating how many tokens it will cost. So, it's great to see that every Jet Brains account now comes with a free baseline model called Juny Light that lives in your IDE and CLI. There's no trial with a countdown clock. It's just a free way to ask questions and get Grunt work done without accidentally bankrupting your family. I used it in the Juni CLI on an old side project to rename a bunch of functions and scaffold some tests and it knocked it all out in a few minutes for $0. I'd still switch to a Frontier model for more complex work, which is really easy because Juny Light lives inside Jet Brains Air where you can run multiple agents in parallel and review all their changes before they land. Start using Junyite for free today at the link below. This has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Watch from 4:32Full transcript
- 0:00
Last week, the JavaScript runtime wars officially ended when the guy who put JavaScript on the server and then spent the next decade atoning for it announced that his company Dino was joining Cloudflare. And on paper, it looks like a pretty traditional Silicon Valley acquisition where the founder says they're excited for the future. The company says they're excited about the mission and the employees learn the hard way what a Pruff Stack is. But if you
- 0:21
think about it, it's a little weird that a company which already has its own runtime and deployment platform would buy a worse one. In today's video, we'll find out what Cloudflare actually paid for, learn why Ryan Doll now thinks re-implementing Node was a bad idea, and dive into what the future of Dino looks like now. And spoiler alert, it's not so good. It is October 15th, 2026, and
- 0:42
you're watching the code report. Back in 2009, Ryan Doll got on stage at JSCOM EU and introduced the world to a new open- source runtime called Node.js that allowed you to write JavaScript on the server. Nine years later, he went back to that same stage with a talk titled 10 things I regret about Node, where he spent most of the time tearing apart the original project before revealing that
- 1:04
he recreated it from scratch, but this time without all the regret. He called it Dino and unlike Node, it came with its own formatter, llinter, and testrunner that supported TypeScript, was secure by default, and had a sensible way to manage external packages. Adino 1.0 0 launched a few years later in 2020 and by 2021 Ryan announced their serverless platform Dino
- 1:24
Deploy along with a fresh $5 million seed round and initially things were going great and Netlefi and Superbase built their edge functions on top of Dino and Slack used it to power their new app platform. The next year in 2022 they got 21 million in series A funding from Sequoia launched a web framework called Fresh and it was looking like they had a real shot at becoming the future of serverside JavaScript. But
- 1:46
then their momentum died. Their biggest problem being that Node didn't just roll over. During those same few years, Node added fetch, a permission model, and the ability to run TypeScript files directly. So, Dino lost its edge. Meanwhile, the products that were supposed to make money weren't gaining enough traction to justify the valuation. Adino Deploy went from 35 regions down to six. Dino KV launched in
- 2:09
2023 and never made it out of beta. And Fresh started going months between releases. At the same time, Ryan took on a legal fight with Oracle over the JavaScript trademark, which Oracle inherited when it bought Sun Microsystems the same year Ryan created Node. It was a noble cause, but a GoFundMe for trademark lawyers probably isn't what Sequoia had in mind when they wrote a $21 million check. The sentiment
- 2:30
got bad enough last year that a developer named David Bushell wrote a blog post declaring that Dena was basically dead since every new release was just more node compatibility fixes in an endless game of ketchup. And ironically, Ryan had come to the same conclusion. He just took a little bit longer to get there. So earlier this year, the team started to look at hard problems that live outside the runtime,
- 2:51
like spreading compute across machines, coordinating state, and scaling. And the best answer they found was Cloudflare's durable objects, which if you're not familiar with are basically tiny singlethreaded servers that each get their own private SQLite database and the ability to hold websocket connections. But the problem with durable objects is that they really only work on Cloudflare. So in August, the
- 3:12
Dino team released their own version they called cell D, which lets you run durable objects on your own servers at a fraction of the cost. And surprisingly, Cloudflare was happy to be ripped off like this. In the announcement post, the creator of Cloudflare Workers said that people have always accused Cloudflare of using workers to lock in developers, but the workers runtime has been open source since 2022 and that they've wanted to
- 3:34
build a self-hostable version for years, but just never got around to it. He even admitted he tried building one himself last spring and he couldn't get it to work. So, when the Dino team figured it out with Cell D, Cloudflare did what anyone with a $123 billion market cap would do and they just bought the whole company. The plan is to have Ryan and co-founder Bert Belder merge celld into Cloudflare's open- source workers
- 3:55
runtime is so that anyone can run workers and durable objects on their own servers with official support from Cloudflare. And because we can't go a whole video without talking about it, Ryan says the big focus is AI agents because durable objects are a natural fit for agents that need cheap compute, persistent state, and real-time connections. But unfortunately, if you're using any Dino product that isn't
- 4:16
CLD, you are screwed. Cloudflare says they'll only continue to ship bug fixes and security patches for Dino for the next year. But after that, they'll stop development altogether. And if you're using Dino deploy today, you have about 6 months to migrate. So in the end, with Anthropic acquiring Bun and Cloudflare buying Dino after it bought V back in June, the only major JavaScript runtime
- 4:36
that isn't owned by a company with a cloud is Node, the one Ryan spent the last 8 years trying to replace. So if you're one of the Dino developers needing to migrate, you can at least make the move a little cheaper with Jet Brains. the sponsor of today's video. Thanks to my childhood financial trauma, every time I ask my coding agent to do anything, my brain starts compulsively calculating how many tokens it will cost. So, it's great to see that every
- 4:58
Jet Brains account now comes with a free baseline model called Juny Light that lives in your IDE and CLI. There's no trial with a countdown clock. It's just a free way to ask questions and get Grunt work done without accidentally bankrupting your family. I used it in the Juni CLI on an old side project to rename a bunch of functions and scaffold some tests and it knocked it all out in
- 5:19
a few minutes for $0. I'd still switch to a Frontier model for more complex work, which is really easy because Juny Light lives inside Jet Brains Air where you can run multiple agents in parallel and review all their changes before they land. Start using Junyite for free today at the link below. This has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Description
SponsorEvery JetBrains account now comes with a free coding model called Junie Lite. Try it: https://jb.gg/JunieLite
Cloudflare just acquired Deno and the creator of Node.js is finally admitting that reimplementing it was a mistake. Let's dive in.
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