Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

In plain words

Ant is a comprehensive JavaScript ecosystem featuring its own runtime and engine, complemented by a package manager, application hosting platform, and desktop application framework. Designed for developers seeking an integrated alternative to existing JavaScript stacks, it aims to function as a cohesive platform while maintaining compatibility with the broader JavaScript ecosystem. The system includes ants.land for package distribution and Ant Desktop for building native desktop applications using web technologies.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Run real npm packages and TypeScript - all from a single 9 MB binary. Ant is a lightweight JavaScript runtime built from scratch on its own engine, with a Node-compatible API, a VM-isolated sandbox, and Wasm support built-in.

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

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  Ants Sandbox - an ants simulator2022 · ants-sandbox.io · ▲367

  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.

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  Antd – A set of high-quality React components2016 · ant.design · ▲507

  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.

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  Ant Design System for Figma2019 · antforfigma.com · ▲315

  A large library of 2100+ handcrafted UI components

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  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,…

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  Ant – A from-scratch JavaScript runtime in 9 MBMay 2026 · github.com · ▲8

  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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  I created a small 2D game about an ant2025 · aanthonymax.github.io · ▲89

  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 ^ ^

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  Life & fun · 1d ago · permit.petercai.com

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• BA
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  Over the past few months, our team has been building more and more slidedecks using web frontend technologies with coding harnesses like Claude Code, but a common complaint is to make even small edits we need to edit the code either manually or via the harness. To avoid this loop, I ended up creating Bento, a single HTML file with everything you need in a slide tool including animations and shared editing. There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it. Open it in a browser and then you can…

  Dev tools · Jul 2026 · bento.page

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  A few days ago I found myself trying out GLM 5.2 and was really positively impressed. The capabilities and security I was getting from this LLM are similar to those I've gotten from models like Claude or GPT, and this really surprised me. But then I thought, "I wonder how it would work on a normal computer like mine," and above all, "I wonder if it would work without going into OOM on a computer like mine." So I started working with the help of agents to test this possibility. I started converting the model to int4, understanding MTP usage, and if possible implementing DSA for long context.…

  AI · Jul 2026 · github.com

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  Dev tools · Jul 2026 · openseo.so