Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, announced celld—a self‑hosted, distributed implementation of Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects that promises lower costs, uses S3 storage, Rust/Tokio runtime, and supports stateful serverless workloads such as real‑time collaboration and AI agents.
The author used EvoX's AI‑agent swarm mode to dissect the histories, design motivations, and trade‑offs of Node.js, Deno, Celld, and later Bun, revealing token‑cost savings, methodological insights, and debunking the claim that Celld is a third‑generation Node.js runtime.
After vowing never to create another JavaScript runtime, Ryan Dahl spent over a year developing celld, an open‑source, self‑hosted distributed runtime that brings Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects to your own machines, using V8, SQLite, Rust async, and S3 for coordination, while exposing its performance trade‑offs and early‑stage limitations.
