Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Ant – A from-scratch JavaScript runtime in 9 MB
Hey HN! I have been working on Ant for a while now, would love to share around now. What is Ant? It's my JavaScript runtime, built from scratch over many hours of work. Much effort has gone into keeping the binary size small, around 9MB at the moment (6.5 MB with -Os). On my M4 Pro, the hono coldstart bench (examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js) lands around 5ms, about 2.4x faster than bun, and 5.8x faster than node. To keep things small, the engine ("Ant Silver") is hand-written, not a wrapper around V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey. The JIT is still a work in progress but it…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
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…
Jul 2026 · antjs.org · its alternatives →
- 2AS
I was inspired to make a web based ants simulator after watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GQNPJip2Y Any feedback appreciated. Best viewed on Chromium based browsers. Firefox is slow for some reason and Safari is not tested as I don't have a Mac.
2022 · ants-sandbox.io · its alternatives →
- 3
Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.
2022 · playcode.io · its alternatives →
- 4
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Bun▲295A fast JS runtime Node.js replacement with built‑in tools
Dec 2025 · bun.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Following the Ant Design specification, we developed a React UI library antd (Pronunciation) that contains a set of high quality components and demos for building rich, interactive user interfaces.
2016 · ant.design · its alternatives →
- 7
We're building a different kind of JavaScript engine, based on data-oriented design and willingness to try something quite out of left field. This is most concretely visible in our major architectural choices: 1. All data allocated on the JavaScript heap is placed into a type-specific vector. Numbers go into the numbers vector, strings into the strings vector, and so on. 2. All heap references are type-discriminated indexes: A heap number is identified by its discriminant value and the index to which it points to in the numbers vector. 3. Objects are also split up into object kind -specific…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Faster user-land reimplementations for several common builtin native JavaScript functions. - codemix/fast.js
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
An extremely fast virtual DOM - React up to 70% faster
2023 · millionjs.org · its alternatives →
- 11
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
A large library of 2100+ handcrafted UI components
2019 · antforfigma.com · its alternatives →
- 13
🌙 The minimal & fast library for functional user interfaces - kbrsh/moon
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16DR
I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 17
As part of the annual JS13K games challenge, I've put together a pretty large (but small-in-code) Metroidvania game that fits in just 13KB of compressed Javascript. The source is available here: https://github.com/arikwex/infernal-sigil NOTE: the current head of the main branch is at 13.6KB due to quality of life patches. The legit 13KB version is tagged in github. Useful hacks: - Using Roadroller (https://github.com/lifthrasiir/roadroller) for compression - Compressing the map data as grayscale PNG paired with some code generation. - Using procedural…
2022 · arineonshark.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 18
⏰ Day.js 2kB immutable date-time library alternative to Moment.js with the same modern API - iamkun/dayjs
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly. You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant. The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered,…
Mar 2026 · dev.moment.com · its alternatives →
- 20
The purely functional user interface library that
2018 · kbrsh.github.io · its alternatives →
- 21
faster.js is a Babel plugin that compiles idiomatic Javascript to faster, micro-optimized Javascript. - vzhou842/faster.js
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hello everyone! I created a short game in just a few days, just for fun, where you play as an ant and feed it apples This game also features random landscape generation, with clouds and trees arranged in a chaotic pattern across all coordinates. This is what took me the longest time :) I would appreciate your feedback ^ ^
2025 · aanthonymax.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23
QuickBEAM is a JavaScript runtime embedded inside the Erlang/OTP VM. If you’re building a full-stack app, JavaScript tends to leak in anyway — frontend, SSR, or third-party code. QuickBEAM runs that JavaScript inside OTP supervision trees. Each runtime is a process with a `Beam` global that can: - call Elixir code - send/receive messages - spawn and monitor processes - inspect runtime/system state It also provides browser-style APIs backed by OTP/native primitives (fetch, WebSocket, Worker, BroadcastChannel, localStorage, native DOM, etc.). This makes it usable for: - SSR…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Wrote a thing about what makes Elysia stand out in a performance benchmark game Basically, there's a JIT "compiler" embedded into a framework This approach has been used by ajv and TypeBox before for input validation, making it faster than other competitors Elysia basically does the same, but scales that into a full backend framework This gave Elysia an unfair advantage in the performance game, making Elysia the fastest framework on Bun runtime, but also faster than most on Node, Deno, and Cloudflare Worker as well, when using the same underlying HTTP adapter There is an escape hatch if…
Feb 2026 · elysiajs.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem alternatives
- Ants Sandbox - an ants simulator alternatives
- I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years alternatives
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- Antd – A set of high-quality React components alternatives
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