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Kamran Ayub
@kamranicus.com

Even if Ryan wanted to (and I believe he did earnestly want to), Deno could never and would never "beat" Node. Not if it had to be compatible. That's playing catch-up to follow the leader. That's not a winning strategy. It will be the same story for any fork that is pursuing that strategy.

Socket@socket.dev

Deno spent years persuading developers to bet on a better runtime. Now its creator calls gains over Node.js “marginal” and says it was “sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility.” The backlash, the forks, and how AI is changing the future of JavaScript runtimes. socket.dev/blog/deno-ac...

socket.devDeno Goes the Way of the DinosaurCloudflare is acquiring Deno’s team, which will provide another year of bug fixes and security updates before ending support for the runtime.
Kamran Ayub
@kamranicus.com

Instead, in my opinion, a better strategy would have been to actually "merge" the best parts of Deno into Node core, basically making Node transform into Deno. It was already mostly compatible. If they wanted to, they could likely have approached Node Foundation with a plan to close the gaps.

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Kamran Ayub
@kamranicus.com

Node would have basically been transformed into a Rust runtime. It would get a better DX. It would mark previous modules as legacy, and there would be a transition plan for 1-2 LTS versions over the next few years. To me that seems like a winning strategy, but now Ryan is not there to steward that.

Kamran Ayub
@kamranicus.com

There's still an opportunity for Node Foundation to do it themselves. I'd be interested in what they think about this.

Kamran Ayub
@kamranicus.com

I dunno man. You didn't need to spend years learning this. In 90 mins you could have foreseen this with a Wardley Map, and I'm not kidding, because we did that for the podcast when we discussed Deno in one of the first episodes. We wanted to be optimistic, but it's hard to argue with the value chain