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Dev tools · May 9, 2026

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.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 7% of May 2026

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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