Ryan Dahl

Ryan Dahl (born 1981) is an American software engineer who created Node.js, the runtime that took JavaScript from the web browser to the server, and later co-created Deno, a newer runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. He is co-founder and chief executive of the Deno company.

Early life

Dahl grew up in San Diego, California. He studied mathematics at UC San Diego and went on to graduate study in algebraic topology at the University of Rochester, but left his PhD programme and moved to South America, where he began building web applications in the Ruby language.

Node.js

Dahl released Node.js on 27 May 2009 and presented it at the JSConf EU conference that November. Built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine, it used non-blocking input and output so that one process could serve many connections, and it quickly became one of the most widely used server platforms. The cloud company Joyent hired him and backed the project. In January 2012 he stepped back from day-to-day work, handing leadership to the creator of npm, Isaac Z. Schlueter. Node.js is now looked after by the OpenJS Foundation.

Deno

At JSConf EU in 2018, in a talk called "10 Things I Regret About Node.js", Dahl set out the design choices he would undo, from the node_modules folder to giving scripts full access to the machine, and showed a prototype of Deno. Built with Bert Belder in the Rust language, Deno runs TypeScript directly and gives a program no access to files or the network unless it is granted. Deno 1.0 was released in May 2020 and Deno 2 in October 2024. In 2024 Dahl led an open letter, and then a formal petition by Deno to the US Patent and Trademark Office, seeking to cancel Oracle's trademark on the name "JavaScript".