Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Summary

There’s been some criticism lately about Deno - about Deploy, KV, Fresh, and our momentum in general. You may have seen some of the criticism online; it’s made the rounds in the usual places, and attracted a fair amount of attention. Some of that criticism is valid. In fact, I think it’s fair to say we’ve had a hand in causing some amount of fear and uncertainty by being too quiet about what we’re working on, and the future direction of our company and products. That’s on us. In other places, recent criticisms have been inaccurate, or speculative. That’s why we’re writing this post; to set the record straight. This is a catch-up on where we are, what we’ve learned, and what we’re building next. Some have feared that Deno itself is diminishing or fading away, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Since the release of Deno 2 last October - barely over six months ago! - Deno adoption has more than doubled according to our monthly active user metrics. Deno 2’s robust Node compatibility effectively removed a major adoption barrier, unblocking a wide range of serious use cases. The platform has gotten faster, simpler, and more capable. Deno is now used more widely - and more seriously - than ever before. Deno Deploy One of the biggest questions we’ve been hearing is about Deno Deploy — specifically, the reduction in available regions. While we understand the optics of this scaling back, it isn’t for the reasons often feared or accused. Rather, reality is: most applications don’t need to run everywhere. They need to be fast, close to their data, easy to debug, and compliant with local regulations. We are optimizing for that. We launched Deno Deploy in 2021 to explore a new model for serverless JavaScript. It started in 25 regions, grew to 35, and now runs in 6. That reduction was driven by cost, yes - but also by usage. Most developers weren’t deploying simple stateless functions. They were building full-stack apps: apps that talk to a database, that almost always i...