Scott Tolinski
Teaches JavaScript and front-end development through Level Up Tutorials, a video course platform, and brings that hands-on teaching angle to conversations about...
“My take on it is that Bun spelled the end of Deno because Deno was the alternative to Node… But it wasn't better enough. Bun came out and Bun's just like, we're fast. We're going to put SQLite in this thing. We're going to start shoving in whatever the heck we want… You got the safe choice, which is Node. You got the crazy choice, which is Bun. And then it's like, okay, I guess I'll pick Deno because it's a little bit better than Node.”
Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
The Syntax hosts reacting to news that the Deno team is going to Cloudflare. Wes Bos had just said Deno tried many things that never caught on; Scott Tolinski blamed its market position between Node and Bun.
Transcript
…you can actually run it on your own servers if you want to. So the main news here, Dino being sunsetted, Worker D is going to be worked on by Ryan Dahl. And also he'll have an initiative at Cloudflare to make it the best open source runtime possible. So big news. What are you thinking on this, Wes?
…bit of a bummer, but like, if I think about my own usage, I use Cloudflare for almost everything. So I'm stoked to see this, right? Ryan is awesome. And that only means that the Cloudflare runtime is going to get bigger and better. So I think there's no better place for this type of thing to go to.
Yeah. My take on it is that Bun spelled the end of Dino because Dino was the alternative to Node, but it was like, here's an alternative that does things in a more secure way by having to opt into those permissions. But it wasn't better enough, right? Where like Bun came out and Bun's just like, we're fast. We're going to put SQLite in this thing. We're going to start shoving in whatever the heck we want. And like the bun, bun, even though it is, I mean, I don't use bun personally, even though it's a little, you know, I don't know. It's a little bit different, right? I think they put Dino in a hard spot because Node was here, Dino was here, and then Bun was like, we're going to be over here. And now where's Dino? Right in the middle of who knows what, right? You got the safe choice, which is Node. You got the crazy choice, which is Bun. And then it's like, okay, I guess I'll pick Dino, I guess, because it's a little bit better than Node. So it was a tough market position for them.
It was, it almost comes down to marketing because they were one of the first to allow you to write TypeScript without having a compilation step, right? And now we take that for granted because you can run TypeScript in Node. You can do it in Bun, but they were the first to be like, just write…
I think it also comes down to like the usability of these types of things because as Dino was all about standards-based, absolutely everything, right? Like I had conference talks on this. I'm like, it's all standards all the way down. They implemented all of the browser features on the server. And…
And also, how many people are using Bun because they didn't care and Cloud Code just chose it for them? Yeah. So
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