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…
Ant – A from-scratch JavaScript runtime in 9 MB launched on May 9, 2026 with 8 votes, #1,430 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
javascript for 🐜's, a tiny runtime with big ambitions - theMackabu/ant
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystemJul 2026 · antjs.org · ▲330Hello 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…
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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.
I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years2022 · playcode.io · ▲397Hi 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.
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Nova JavaScript Engine2024 · github.com · ▲271We'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…
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