> since it push on semantics that can only be run on Cloudflare infrastructure
No, workerd and its semantics are not exclusive to Cloudflare infrastructure. People really do run it in production without using Cloudflare at all (I really wish I was allowed to say who because one of the users is hilariously ironic...).
Ryan's and Bert's core focus at Cloudflare is going to be making the self-hosting story better.
> workerd and its semantics are not exclusive to Cloudflare infrastructure
I believe they are. You may be able to run workerd, but you can't run D1 (Sqlite alternative), you can't run KV or Queues (please correct me if I'm wrong).
All those are primitives that already exist in the non CF world: KV can be easily redis/memcached. Queues, Kafka and so on. I believe that a system that reuses those would be stronger.
> I really wish I was allowed to say who because one of the users is hilariously ironic
Ok, this peaked my curiosity. Would be great if you could share it!
> You may be able to run workerd, but you can't run D1 (Sqlite alternative), you can't run KV or Queues (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Details remain to be worked out, but part of the goal of the project is to make all these interfaces plugable with reference implementations that can sit on common infrastructure.
In fact, celld has already done a lot of this.
> Ok, this peaked my curiosity. Would be great if you could share it!
You'll have to find me in person over drinks somehow. ;)
> They had plans to buy out a company with the explicit intent to shut down their main product.
I understand why it looks that way, and we knew it would be hard to combat this perception.
But it's simply not true.
The actual story is simply this: The Deno team made a strategic decision to refocus on celld, and we (Cloudflare) are excited to support this work, for the reasons I explained in the blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/deno-joins-cloudflare/
I agree it would be an awkward choice for an agent that runs as a local application, but the trend I think is towards agents running more and more on servers.
TL;DR: Ryan and co. will be merging celld with workerd to create one first-class open source self-hostable runtime for Workers and Durable Objects. In the post I explain in the post why, contrary to what you might think, this is good business for Cloudflare and we're very excited about it.
I do appreciate that it's not explicitly anti-competitive, but as a biochemist who spent a lot of time thinking about living systems, I am a bit concerned about a budding ecology that has perhaps collapsed <3
But I do have a strangely high trust in the individuals involved (you, Ryan, Sunil, others), even though I am a bit perplexed by CloudFlare's incentives or economics
Which is to say: I am choosing to be optimistic :)
Caveat, am commenting before reading, mind you -- just my general reaction to mergers in a world that never cleaves :)
EDIT: though this has also probably deflated a lot of the good-faith conversations I was having with gov-adjacent Europeans about celld being a boon for the moment of heightened European sovereignty, where EU data residency isn't necessarily considered enough distance anymore.
It's a joint decision and I agree with it. I'm most invested in its success and have put the most work into it - and I no longer think it's where I can do the most important work. There are some good ideas in Deno and it's well engineered - but it ultimately is not solving big problems. It has been sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility, which forces it to behave exactly as Node does. Why reimplement Node? It works. Marginal performance or UX or security benefits are not enough.
I'm interested in building powerful new abstractions. celld has been working remarkably well, depending only on object storage for coordination and persistence. It is not just a slightly different API to interact with the file system or network - it's an entirely new model for server development. I wrote a bit about it here: https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2105853283617440032
We'll ship monthly releases for a year, and Deno stays MIT-licensed. If people want to carry it forward, I'd like that.
Why let it get sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility then? How can the community carry it forward without you? Will CloudFlare release the name/assets, or it will have to be forked?
> once you see it, you'll realize there's no point to traditional javascript runtimes in serving applications - only for build processes (eg bundling) and scripting.
I suspect he's come to the conclusion that the runtimes are now just a commodified build system that's been dialed in already, and the layer where celld sits is where the next unvalidated opportunities are
Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.
And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.
A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.
I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.
I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.
WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.
It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:
And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.
(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
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