Ant - Lightweight JavaScript runtime with near-V8 speeds
Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
Ant is a high-performance JavaScript runtime built from scratch, delivering near-V8 speeds from a single 9 MB binary. Unlike traditional runtimes, it requires no complex toolchain setup and runs real npm packages instantly. Developers can write TypeScript without a build step, install packages up to 40x faster than npm, and deploy servers in seconds. Ant also features a robust VM-isolated sandbox for securely running untrusted code, making it an ideal choice for modern web development, serverless functions, and secure environments on macOS and Linux.
Ant is a lightweight, high-performance JavaScript runtime built from scratch that runs real npm packages and delivers near-V8 speeds from a single 9 MB binary.
- tekacs
I code with AI all day, every day. But I do think that it's worth pointing to this issue (from March).
The author has said that they've redone it since, but the "from-scratch hand-built" framing specifically – for me – somewhat grates given the original heavy lifting from an existing AGPL codebase.
https://github.com/cesanta/elk/issues/75
I want to acknowledge that the original authors don't seem to have minded too much – per that thread – after older versions were dropped.
For context, the current code doesn't look like it is the same shape, the same structure, etc., etc. – it _has_ been rewritten since (the 'since Feb' rewrite mentioned adjacent is related to this, AFAICT).
To the author: I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks.
- lucb1e
Why call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org
- m3h
The author shared their experience building the first version in a month: https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month
And then the follow up few months later: https://themackabu.dev/blog/ant-part-two
I'm not sure what the economics of building a new runtime and ecosystem from scratch are but it seems we're already in a phase where individual developers are creating software which previously took a whole team. And its only getting started...
- carimura
i was just joking about Anthropic's `ant` CLI not caring about Apache `ant` (maybe one person got it), and now we're talking about Javascript `ant`!
- colinhb
I’m not that deep in the JS ecosystem or runtimes, but I’m a little surprised by some of the claims here about being smaller, having fast starts, sandboxing, performance-competitive, etc.
Does anyone have a sense of what insights, design choices, big bets, etc, unlock all these advantages against already mature and highly optimised JS stacks?
- tobr
What is the serif typeface used on the website? It’s been renamed (I assume) to ant_serif and scrubbed of any other identifiers. It’s very pleasant.
- egnehots
You're stating: "delivers near-V8 speeds"
But according to zoo.js benchmarks that is far from the case:
Unless there were major perf gains since 2026-02-10?
- pikuseru
The thing that caught my eye immediately was the sandboxing. I have no idea why Node and npm don’t have sandboxing by default. It would greatly help with some of these worms and supply chain attacks.