The developers of Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, have announced they've formed a company and had an injection of funds.

Deno uses V8 and is built in Rust. It is described as secure by default as it has no file, network, or environment access, unless explicitly enabled.  Deno was created by the same developer who created node.js - Ryan Dahl - and its name is a rearrangement of the letters in node.

An updated version of Deno was released in March at which point the developers described it as containing "a massive amount of new features and stabilizations", including experimental support for the WebGPU API. Deno has been designed as is a set of technologies rather than one product to make it possible to choose only the bindings required for a particular set  of requirements. There are custom runtimes for different applications: Electron-style GUIs, Cloudflare Worker-style Serverless Functions, embedded scripting for databases, etc.

The development team has now raised 4.9 million dollars of seed capital to pursue their ideas more fully, with investors including the Mozilla Corporation and Deno's long-time collaborator Ben Noordhuis. The Deno team says:

"This investment means we will have a staff of full-time expert engineers working to improving Deno. We will ensure that issues are addressed, bugs are fixed, timely releases are made; we will ensure Deno is a platform others can build on with trust."

The team is clear that Deno will remain MIT licensed, saying that for Deno to grow and be maximally useful, it must remain permissively free:

"We don’t believe the “open core” business model is right for a programming platform like Deno. We do not want to find ourselves in the unfortunate position where we have to decide if certain features are for paid customers only."

The team describes themselves as bullish about the technology stack they've built, saying they intend to pursue those commercial applications themselves, and their business will build on the open source project, not attempt to monetize it directly.  The consensus among Deno enthusiasts seems to be that Deno will offer Deno Deploy, a distributed system that runs JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly at the edge, as a managed paid-for service.

More Information

Deno Website

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