Alternatives
Products that do what Ant – A from-scratch JavaScript runtime in 9 MB does
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…
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Hi everyone, I'm working for a startup called BugFree Software and would love to hear your feedback on a new product we are launching today. Helium is a library that wraps around Selenium to simplify web automation. It does away with many of the technicalities involved with web scripting. For example: Here is a Selenium script. Can you guess what it does? >>> ff = Firefox() ... >>> text_area = ff.find_element_by_id("u_0_1q") >>> text_area.send_keys("Hello World!") >>> button = ff.find_element_by_class_name("_42g-") >>> button.click() Here is the same script rewritten using Helium: >>>…
2013 · heliumhq.com
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I wanted to have a framework that would let me build web apps faster than ever before. I didn’t care if it was a little hacky or didn’t use best practices — I wanted to be able to get a multi-user application out the door in hours instead of months. I researched the CMS space for months before deciding to build something from scratch. My goal was to be 90% done building a web app once I had the static HTML and CSS finished. I’m not a big fan of building out API endpoints over and over again for every new app, fiddling with a database, or doing lots of config. What I ended up with was a…
2020
- 10SS
Raw performance (the lack of) is always a contentious point for JavaScript, especially in our post-Moore era of computing. Node.js gets around this issue through extensive of use of native libraries and modules written in C, including the V8 JS engine itself. But as application developers, how do YOU create high performance functions? Write in C and run as a NAPI module? Write in Rust and run as a V8 wasm? Well, there is another (better and faster) way now! The SSVM is a fully featured WebAssembly VM that is optimized for server-side applications.…
2020
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I have developed a lightweight JavaScript framework that utilizes a single class and occupies only 1.7KB of gziped JavaScript. The framework features a Vue-inspired API and supports functionalities such as if, for, slot, and bind.
2023 · github.com
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Hey Everyone, I just ran a [rather silly] race between Puppeteer (JS), Playwright (Python) and Selenium (Python) to see which one would be fastest on a simple scrape (using Google Colab so you can also run it) Far from a comprehensive benchmark, this race is 100% free from advanced configurations, multi-threading or anything complicated. It just opens Wallapop (a second hand marketplace in Spain) and times how long it takes to extract the first 2000 results of a search. If you like this simple format, have any ideas on how to improve a race like this or have a strong urge to prove Ward…
2023 · colab.research.google.com
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Hey HN, We just released v5 of LemonadeJS, a micro-reactive library (~5.5KB compressed, no dependencies) that brings reactivity, scoped state, and JSX support to browser-native JavaScript. Key Features in v5: - Private reactive state for components - Scoped events for modularity - JSX support (via a Babel plugin) - children argument for nested components - Template literal interpolation - Improved DOM rendering performance Use it with plain JS, TypeScript, or JSX — no build step required. Ideal for browser tools, widgets, or building fast UIs without bundlers.…
2025 · lemonadejs.com
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Hi, over the past few months I've been working on this project: Numax is a small Rust runtime that does three things: it runs WebAssembly modules in a sandbox, has a built-in local key-value store, and syncs everything across nodes with CRDTs and gossip. Basically, you write a wasm module, run it on two machines, and they converge (I hope !). It's a decentralized system... I hope someone finds it interesting! There's a whitepaper I've put a lot into, and I think the code isn't bad either! I believe there's still room in this world for software that's fun and well made, and while building…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Most ZK proving systems are optimized for server-grade hardware with massive RAM. When scaling to industrial-sized traces (2^20+ rows), they often hit a "Memory Wall" where allocation and data movement become a larger bottleneck than the actual computation. I have been developing Hekate, a ZK engine written in Rust that utilizes a Zero-Copy streaming model and a hybrid tiled evaluator. To test its limits, I ran a head-to-head benchmark against Binius64 on an Apple M3 Max laptop using Keccak-256. The results highlight a significant architectural divergence: At 2^15 rows: Binius64 is faster…
Jan 2026
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After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
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Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…
2025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev
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2017 · github.com
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Hi HN! Happy to share that jist can now search JSON 17x faster than jq for a provided input (string or a file). The major change is using the bleeding edge simdjson parser as the preferred way of parsing and querying the input. Since simdjson can only work on files up to 4.2GB, jist falls back to its earlier implementation of scanning through input in chunks of 1MB which means it can still query files of virtually infinite size 3x faster than jq ever could while using ~10MB of memory. The next major feature will be summarizing input JSON into a schema - and it will do this by scanning the…
2025 · github.com
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After almost a year of development and iterating, we just released Legend-State 1.0. It's the fastest React state library and is very easy to use, based on Observables (Signals) with fine-grained reactivity and built-in persistence. I'd love to know what you think, and I'm also happy to answer any general JavaScript performance questions if you want since I've gone very deep into optimizing . https://github.com/LegendApp/legend-state
2023 · legendapp.com
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Hey everyone! Some time ago I was analyzing why React apps are so hard to optimize, and came to a conclusion that the lack of atomic updates is the culprit. I made an experimental library which basically updates everything in place directly in HTML. At some point I became aware that Solidjs exists, which is a very similar idea, but at the end of the day I realized my approach to API is quite different and warrants the existence of my library (my state primitive allows selector subscriptions, array iterators return a state primitive with the element, allowing to never re-render the whole…
2024 · github.com
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Hi everyone, the other day I was here cause I thought I came up with a neat way of creating HTML via JavaScript [1] - After some iterations, I'm quite content with the code I wrote. Since I intend to use this in my personal projects, I thought others might as well. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41451559
2024 · github.com
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Hi everyone, I've been working on this thing for a while. It transpiles Haml into Ruby, and then it streams patches to the browser which update the DOM. There is a memory leak in s.rb, which I'm not really sure how to solve. Seems like objects stay alive for longer than they should because of circular references or something but I'm not sure what's going on to be honest. I think this approach has potential though.
2023 · github.com
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Hey everyone, Rahim here, an indie maker with a passion for building useful tools. This time, I'm excited to share FasterNode.io: a turbo booster for your Node.js SaaS project! Think of it as a pre-built foundation packed with goodies like user auth, payments, and clean code. This means you can launch weeks, not months, faster and focus on what truly matters - building an awesome SaaS that solves problems! Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, FasterNode.io is here to streamline your journey. Curious to learn more? Let's ditch the boilerplate code and build something…
2024
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