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Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
Hello HN!
I'm the author of Ant, a JavaScript ecosystem built around a runtime with its own JavaScript engine. Ant also includes a package manager, the ants.land package registry, a platform for deploying and hosting applications, and Ant Desktop for building native desktop apps with web technologies, similar to Electron.
The goal is for these pieces to work as one coherent platform while remaining compatible with the wider JavaScript ecosystem. It's still early, and I'd appreciate any feedback on the overall direction or what you'd like to see from an e2e alternative to the existing JavaScript stacks.
P.S. I’ve shared Ant here before as a runtime; since then, it has grown into the broader ecosystem you see today.
- Reubend 3mo agoCan this engine be embedded into other programs?
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoI have actually known* about Ant for some time from your previous submissions and its really interesting and I wish the project luck! Do you think that Ant could be used to create a small index.html/css/js project into an desktop app minimally. I currently found deno desktop which is pretty recent to be the easiest way of doing this for one of my projects (https://epub.mirror.forum https://epub.mirror.forum) but I found there to be some issues within deno-desktop in terms of some features not working on the desktop app but I overall really like the idea of converting these files into desktop apps and I am wondering if ant could be suitable for that, so I am curious to hear what you think :-D
- douxx 3mo agoAnt desktop is currently in development, from what I recall http://ants.land/ant-desktop http://ants.land/ant-desktop
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoHmm, the ants.land website in general isn't resolving for my desktop but it is resolving for my laptop, a bit strange. It states: Server Not Found, Zen can’t connect to the server at ants.land What can you do about it? Try connecting on a different device. Check your modem or router. Disconnect and reconnect to Wi-Fi. yet my laptop which also uses zen which is also connected to the same Wi-Fi resolves the page so I am not sure.
- douxx 3mo agoWeird, maybe your DNS settings on your desktop or an extension blocking it?
- theMackabu 3mo agothats very weird, its hosted on cloudflare workers atm. might be blocked by your isp? ive seen that happen to .land
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoOh I think that I might be getting it now but I had an custom nextdns profile set up on my browser using nextdns with some more aggressive setups using typosquatting protection etc. It seems that changing the dns setting made it resolve and afterwards even going back to the same profile is now (resolving it again?) [Could it be that the domain is now cached not needing to go to the dns provider] but I guess that I wouldn't blame you guys about it so much and just wanted to inform y'all of it :-D > ive seen that happen to .land interesting, is there any reason behind DNS/(ISP?) providers blocking .land domains?
- theMackabu 3mo ago> interesting, is there any reason behind DNS/(ISP?) providers blocking .land domains? tbh have not seen any reason behind it, just saw my ants.land get blocked a office firewall once while demoing
- theMackabu 3mo agojust got the thing for you actually! literally just finished a stable version last night, https://www.npmjs.com/package/ant-desktop https://www.npmjs.com/package/ant-desktop. WIP still, chromium only renderer backend but webview and other backends coming soon as well. no local ant install needed as libant is bundled, when CI finishes ill have windows/linux builds too
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoOh great! it seems, that great thinkers think alike :-D Good to see that you are already working on it though, Good luck and I will hopefully try to keep a keen eye on the project for my use-cases when I need something more flexible than rust iced applications but also having a small footprint. It's good to see more competition within this space so good luck with that!
- theMackabu 3mo ago:D
- cognitiveinline 3mo agoHow big are these binaries? the big electron complaint is the large binaries. if these are under 10mb, you have a winner.
- esafak 3mo agoI hope you get some collaborators, to increase the bus factor. You might want to write a roadmap to focus efforts.
- theMackabu 3mo agogood idea!
- dvh 3mo agoWhat's the benefits over v8?
- theMackabu 3mo agoits ~8mb including the entire runtime and node-compat work. pretty simple to embed anywhere as well
- ptx 3mo agoAnd what are the tradesoffs? How is it so much smaller than V8 while also apparently including a package manager, a web server, a TypeScript compiler and a hypervisor?
- theMackabu 3mo ago> How is it so much smaller than V8 while also apparently including a package manager, a web server, a TypeScript compiler and a hypervisor? Much less complex tiers of jit, no unicode ICU, and no startup js snapshot
- hippietrail 3mo agoDoes it roll its own Unicode solution without ICU, or does it forgo Unicode? Or somewhere in between?
- theMackabu 3mo agoLATEST RELEASE REQUIRES A STATIC RELEASE HOTFIX!! https://github.com/theMackabu/ant/actions/runs/29167621329 https://github.com/theMackabu/ant/actions/runs/29167621329. im very sorry everyone who tried to install and got a libcares error :(
- rvz 3mo agook?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bellowsgulch 3mo ago> Something you could distribute without dragging along hundreds of megabytes of V8 or Node. Holy crap, V8 is that big now? Very interested in this for embedding purposes.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- progx 3mo agohttps://zoo.js.org/ https://zoo.js.org/ V8 21M, Score 47285, ES6 98% Ant 4.3M, >>> Score 69 <<<, ES6 50%
- theMackabu 3mo agothis is very out of date, from February. please just check the repo or even run the tests
- djfobbz 3mo agoI can't get Bun to work under WSL1, which is super annoying. Does Ant support WSL1?
- theMackabu 3mo agounknown, have not tried. but let me know if it does work
- nesarkvechnep 3mo ago[flagged]
- 7bit 3mo agoWhy are you Not using WSL2?
- freedomben 3mo agoNot OP, but WSL1 is still much more performant in some areas, like lower memory use, startup times, quicker windows file access. I haven't used WSL1 in quite some time but I believe it's also still fully supported so use what's better for your use case
- seabrookmx 3mo agoLikely not. A lot of debuggers don't work under WSL1 either due to missing syscalls. I know some folks love the "purity" of WSL 1 but it's really hard to recommend if you care at all about Linux compatibility.
- carimura 3mo agoi was just joking about Anthropic's `ant` CLI not caring about Apache `ant` (maybe one person got it), and now we're talking about Javascript `ant`!
- ebiester 3mo agoI thought I was the only person who remembered Apache Ant... I know we're running out of names but that was a really influential piece of infrastructure.
- sivanmz 3mo agoI was working on our ant build last night
- theMackabu 3mo agoI dont know a single soul who uses the Anthropic `ant` cli....
- ftchd 3mo agoIsn't `claude` anthropic's CLI? :D
- guessmyname 3mo agoAnthropic develops at least two command line interfaces (CLI’s): • (ant) https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cli https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cli • (claude) https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code
- skybrian 3mo agoCould you use the JSR package registry instead of setting up a new one?
- randall 3mo ago+1 to this.
- gandreani 3mo agoI agree! It seems the author is already making thoughtful decisions on what to implement and what to drop. You kinda have to when it's a project of this scope. Implementing, running, maintaining, scaling a module registry is probably not worth the time. Unless there's a clear technical requirement from the runtime. I would think there isn't since npm protocol compatibility is a stated goal/feature.
- egnehots 3mo agoYou're stating: "delivers near-V8 speeds" But according to zoo.js benchmarks that is far from the case: https://zoo.js.org/ https://zoo.js.org/ Unless there were major perf gains since 2026-02-10?
- theMackabu 3mo agomany, the engine has basically gone through a full rewrite since feb, that was still mostly interpt and missing many jit ops. nightly will include benchmarks soon as well
- digitaltrees 3mo agoCool project. I am working on a JavaScript dialect for my kids and non technical team members. I’ll target and as a run time.
- tekacs 3mo agoI code with AI all day, every day. But I do think that it's worth pointing to this issue (from March). The author has said that they've redone it since, but the "from-scratch hand-built" framing specifically – for me – somewhat grates given the original heavy lifting from an existing AGPL codebase. https://github.com/cesanta/elk/issues/75 https://github.com/cesanta/elk/issues/75 I want to acknowledge that the original authors don't seem to have minded too much – per that thread – after older versions were dropped. For context, the current code doesn't look like it is the same shape, the same structure, etc., etc. – it _has_ been rewritten since (the 'since Feb' rewrite mentioned adjacent is related to this, AFAICT). To the author: I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks.
- theMackabu 3mo agothis was flagging code from all the way back in dec of 2025, back when this project was just some idea and not what it is today. around feb thats when basically deleted the existing codebase and designed a much more reliable system from the ground up. I knew the existing code was basically pure slop, and it was not the biggest issue then, now nothing goes past me unreviewed and untested > To the author: I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks. Thank you!
- nhinck2 3mo ago> now nothing goes past me unreviewed and untested So it's not hand-built?
- Lerc 3mo agoWhat is? I, at the very least, need a keyboard.
- lthi747 3mo agoDoes using non AI code autocompletions and code templates makes your code non hand written? Because I think it’s based on same idea - “prediction of next word”. And sometimes with just few buttons pressed you get surprisely good lines.
- randall 3mo agowow! i’ve been using deno for a long time, and one of my fav features is compiling a binary. i didn’t see anything about that, but might have missed something… do you all plan to support this?
- theMackabu 3mo agoyes! I will be making a roadmap like a comment here suggested, should help
- jonahx 3mo ago[dead]
- simonw 3mo ago[dead]
- lucb1e 3mo agoWhy call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org https://ant.apache.org
- steve-atx-7600 3mo agoYes. You would only name it ant if you wanted to taint the first impression of anyone that’s been coding for a couple decades or more.
- brabel 3mo agoOr if you have only started in the last few years and never heard of those older projects.
- giglamesh 3mo agoAnd could not be bothered to make the tiniest cursory check to see if the name was already in use by a well known project.
- brabel 3mo agoIt's pretty difficult to tell whether something is, or was at some point, a well known project. Things that were major 20 years ago but are no longer used tend to become invisible since search engines prioritize recent knowledge. For example, I think young developers would not know that SOAP was a major, like really major, technology in the 2000's. If you google for SOAP now, you get "cleaning products" mostly, and if you're lucky a single mention of the protocol - but unless you dig deeper, it's hard to find out it was actually THE industry standard for web services at some point. IMO it's exactly the same with Ant (I used Apache Ant a lot in my early days as a dev!! But I've seen how very few Java devs know it these days, it's one of those things only the older guys know, plus a few younger one who have an interest in build systems in general and their history).
- girvo 3mo agoAnt in JS land is already claimed and huge too lol https://ant.design/ https://ant.design/
- pikuseru 3mo agoThe thing that caught my eye immediately was the sandboxing. I have no idea why Node and npm don’t have sandboxing by default. It would greatly help with some of these worms and supply chain attacks.
- ptx 3mo agoThe "VM-isolated sandbox" is apparently not referring to the JavaScript VM but to a hypervisor, according to the text a bit further down on the page. I wouldn't expect that to be particularly fast or efficient, especially not if you're already running in a VM and have to use nested virtualization (if it's even available).
- theMackabu 3mo agoits pretty fast tbh, though third-party benches would be great to have!
- ptx 3mo agoIs it essentially implementing a paravirtualized OS that runs the JS runtime? Presumably you have to allocate the memory for the VM up front, or how does that work?
- theMackabu 3mo agoon linux its kvm, on darwin its hypervisor.framework, the memory is not upfront, by default 256mb is lazy allocated, and ~35mb are used by both ant + the vm. the kernel is https://nanos.org https://nanos.org with patches to get ant+networking running smoothly
- cognitiveinline 3mo agoDoes it work on windows?
- 3mo ago
- gaurang404 3mo agoDamnn, gonna try this for sure
- sylware 3mo agoCannot access the web site: whatwg cartel web engine only. Is antjs coded in plain and simple C?
- rererereferred 3mo agoSeems like so: https://github.com/theMackabu/ant https://github.com/theMackabu/ant Odd choice for a vibecoded project.
- lelanthran 3mo ago> Odd choice for a vibecoded project. Not really, there's some advantages if the viber is experienced in C. 1. When the LLM needs to figure out what functions exist, it reads only headers, not the actual implementation. IME the agent uses a fraction of tokens compared to vibing out a Java or C# project. 2. There's only a handful of common footguns in C (signed overflow, use-after-free, dereferencing NULL, etc) all of which are localised, compared to C++ which has all those C footguns plus non-localised footguns that can't be easily detected without knowing the entire program at once.
- sylware 3mo agoThx for the github.com link, I can have a look at it.
- theMackabu 3mo ago> Odd choice for a vibecoded project. I'm using coding agents to accelerate implementation, not to replace understanding or review. The architecture, technical decisions, testing, and final responsibility are still mine, so I don't think "vibecoded" is an accurate description here.
- EvilGoose 3mo agoThis looks excellent. The sandboxing really stands out to me, and I think ant.land might have potential, since it has a lot of great features other registries lack.
- m3h 3mo agoThe author shared their experience building the first version in a month: https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month And then the follow up few months later: https://themackabu.dev/blog/ant-part-two https://themackabu.dev/blog/ant-part-two I'm not sure what the economics of building a new runtime and ecosystem from scratch are but it seems we're already in a phase where individual developers are creating software which previously took a whole team. And its only getting started...
- hollowturtle 3mo ago> The engine, Ant Silver, is hand-built.
- vips7L 3mo agoIt’s not hand-built. It’s hand prompted.
- hoppp 3mo agoI don't like it. There is no shame in saying it's generated, bun is now completely vibe code also. Saying it's hand built when it's not is false advertising
- bblb 3mo agoWriting code by your own hands is an esoteric hobby. We are past the slop era. This is coding now. If you're 1x, you're not a dev. I would assume by now most of the code published on Github is hand-built with LLM prompts and armies of AI agents.
- CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago[flagged]
- tobr 3mo agoWhat is the serif typeface used on the website? It’s been renamed (I assume) to ant_serif and scrubbed of any other identifiers. It’s very pleasant.
- hexsprite 3mo agoi might try porting this to rust ;)
- gandreani 3mo agoThis is very interesting! The sandboxing and quick startup make this an interesting foundation for a FaaS system. Lots of frontend devs (and vibe coders) just want a "deploy my code" service.
- deanc 3mo agoAnd who are you? Why should we trust you and your runtime?
- stephenlf 3mo agoSlick project. Very cool.
- Kwpolska 3mo agoThe author has supposedly created a company (https://sf.tools/ https://sf.tools/), with a broken /jobs page, and yet is developing the project under their personal GitHub account. Does not look trustworthy.
- quadrature 3mo ago> Does not look trustworthy what are you implying specifically ?
- theMackabu 3mo agothis page is literally a inside joke, theres a reason /jobs doesn't work (im not hiring)
- fatata123 3mo ago[dead]
- cognitiveinline 3mo agoAh you're the cluely guy!
- theMackabu 3mo agonot anymore!
- bel8 3mo agoI don't understand the correlation.
- avaer 3mo agoEven assuming the worst interpretation, I don't understand how his translates to the trustworthiness of an open source project.
- colinhb 3mo agoI’m not that deep in the JS ecosystem or runtimes, but I’m a little surprised by some of the claims here about being smaller, having fast starts, sandboxing, performance-competitive, etc. Does anyone have a sense of what insights, design choices, big bets, etc, unlock all these advantages against already mature and highly optimised JS stacks?
- CharlesW 3mo agoThis project appears to be an LLM-rewritten Elk (https://github.com/cesanta/elk https://github.com/cesanta/elk), as noted elsewhere in the thread. That project was established in 2019.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- port11 3mo agoDeno offers practically everything I see here, but is mature, serious, written before LLMs (not sure about now), and has a solid team behind it. But okay, it’s not the fastest kid on the block; although “X but faster” isn’t the most compelling argument to adopt a new runtime. As to the choices this project made: well, Claude or Codex seems to have chosen to copy large parts of the Elk codebase.
- 123sereusername 3mo ago[dead]
- jeremyjh 3mo agoI don’t really see how you appeal to JavaScript developers with “small binaries”. What is a 50mb runtime you down once next to a 200mb node_modules ?
- weli 3mo agoAt least with bun you can compile with bytecode enabled. That, tree shaking and other optimizations our production app entire docker image is like 120mb...
- theMackabu 3mo agothis is coming soon!
- franciscop 3mo agoNot everyone has 200mb node_modules. Many of us, indie JS makers making those libraries, care in fact about the size of our projects, runtimes, installed libraries, etc. I'd even argue it's more mainstream usage (e.g. even me, when I'm at work) where that is more shipping features than spending time in crafting nice tiny libraries/package. So I'd say JS authors caring about the small binaries is very understandable.
- versecafe 3mo ago[dead]
- derdi 3mo agoWhat's the fuzzing story? If this is meant to be a product, hopefully it's being fuzzed 24/7, using multiple state-of-the-art JavaScript fuzzers, against multiple state-of-the-art JavaScript engines?
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- relug 3mo agoif this is trying to competing with v8/llvm thats compiler stuff u gotta be benching and comparing assembly not "hono boot" lol
- hoistbypetard 3mo agoSeems odd not to acknowledge and differentiate yourself from [apache ant](https://ant.apache.org https://ant.apache.org). Failure to do so certainly makes me think the new project isn't very serious.
- stickfigure 3mo agoAlso Ant Design. The word is too heavily overloaded, even in the JS ecosystem.
- steele 3mo agoComing soon: LLM harness of the day called make
- syrusakbary 3mo agoIt's refreshing to see more self-made JS runtimes. I'd love to see if I can integrate it onto Edge.js for full Node.js support ( https://edgejs.org https://edgejs.org )
- theMackabu 3mo agowould be cool to see!
- vladsiu 3mo ago[dead]
- tujux 3mo agoWould really like to hear the motivation behind why you're building this :)
- h1696UOuk 3mo agoI get the runtime, the engine, and the colony as a monetization angle. What I don't get is: - Another registry (looks like jsr.io)? - Another package manager - Ant Desktop? - Sandboxes? - treatjs (what even is that)? I'd love to see a JS runtime that does one thing: run JavaScript. I don't get why everyone is aiming for an all-in-one toolbox. To me this project already seems convoluted.
- curtisblaine 3mo agoI see benchmarks for cold start, why there are no benchmarks for runtime performance Vs Node, Deno and Bun? (and quickjs et al.)?
- gfat 3mo agoAppreciate the typography and simple design of the site and its registry.
- felooboolooomba 3mo agoLooks really good on the surface. But if you really want to sell it, link to a comprehensive benchmark suit and more comparisons. Because if you don't, people tend to (subconsciously) apply adverse inference.
- Geee 3mo agoDoes it support WebGPU?
- gjmveloso 3mo agoGreat start, clean ergonomics and API surface. Does `antx` executions are sandboxed by default using `ant:sandbox`?
- sirjaz 3mo agoThis looks like a great replacement for electron
- glyptic 3mo agoThe design of the website looks very close to: https://cognition.com https://cognition.com
- qiaobax 3mo ago[dead]
- qiaobax 3mo ago[dead]
- md-ayaz-me 3mo agoWake up babe, new javascript framework has been launched!
- guillaume_code 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]