Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem(antjs.org)

135 points by theMackabu 2 hours ago | 52 comments

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 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 JavaScript stacks.

P.S. I’ve shared Ant here before as a runtime; since then, it has grown into the broader ecosystem you see today.

tekacs 1 hour ago |

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.

magicalist 47 minutes ago | |

Ok, but this post: https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month

isn't the post of someone who just implemented a js engine (it reads like someone who asked an LLM to write a blog post about the git log of a different LLM which was apparently lifting code from a different js engine...)

It's a bit hard to understand what's going on here, but definitely hard to trust the project.

theMackabu 1 hour ago | |

this was flagging code from all the way back in dec of 2025, back when this project was just some idea and not what it is today.

around feb thats when basically deleted the existing codebase and designed a much more reliable system from the ground up.

I knew the existing code was basically pure slop, and it was not the biggest issue then, now nothing goes past me unreviewed and untested

> To the author: I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks.

Thank you!

Kwpolska 31 minutes ago |

The author has supposedly created a company (https://sf.tools/), with a broken /jobs page, and yet is developing the project under their personal GitHub account. Does not look trustworthy.

theMackabu 4 minutes ago | |

this page is literally a inside joke, theres a reason /jobs doesn't work (im not hiring)

bel8 1 minute ago | |

I don't understand the correlation.

quadrature 14 minutes ago | |

> Does not look trustworthy

what are you implying specifically ?

m3h 1 hour ago |

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...

hollowturtle 4 minutes ago | |

> The engine, Ant Silver, is hand-built.

lucb1e 1 hour ago |

Why call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org

girvo 5 minutes ago | |

Ant in JS land is already claimed and huge too lol

https://ant.design/

steve-atx-7600 17 minutes ago | |

Yes. You would only name it ant if you wanted to taint the first impression of anyone that’s been coding for a couple decades or more.

colinhb 27 minutes ago |

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?

CharlesW 12 minutes ago | |

This project appears to be an LLM-rewritten Elk (https://github.com/cesanta/elk), as noted elsewhere in the thread. That project was established in 2019.

carimura 2 hours ago |

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`!

ebiester 1 hour ago | |

I thought I was the only person who remembered Apache Ant... I know we're running out of names but that was a really influential piece of infrastructure.

theMackabu 1 hour ago | |

I dont know a single soul who uses the Anthropic `ant` cli....

gandreani 53 minutes ago |

This is very interesting! The sandboxing and quick startup make this an interesting foundation for a FaaS system.

Lots of frontend devs (and vibe coders) just want a "deploy my code" service.

pikuseru 1 hour ago |

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.

egnehots 1 hour ago |

You're stating: "delivers near-V8 speeds"

But according to zoo.js benchmarks that is far from the case:

https://zoo.js.org/

Unless there were major perf gains since 2026-02-10?

theMackabu 1 hour ago | |

many, the engine has basically gone through a full rewrite since feb, that was still mostly interpt and missing many jit ops.

nightly will include benchmarks soon as well

tobr 1 hour ago |

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.

digitaltrees 1 hour ago |

Cool project. I am working on a JavaScript dialect for my kids and non technical team members. I’ll target and as a run time.

skybrian 1 hour ago |

Could you use the JSR package registry instead of setting up a new one?

gandreani 58 minutes ago | |

I agree! It seems the author is already making thoughtful decisions on what to implement and what to drop. You kinda have to when it's a project of this scope.

Implementing, running, maintaining, scaling a module registry is probably not worth the time. Unless there's a clear technical requirement from the runtime. I would think there isn't since npm protocol compatibility is a stated goal/feature.

randall 1 hour ago | |

+1 to this.

EvilGoose 1 hour ago |

This looks excellent. The sandboxing really stands out to me, and I think ant.land might have potential, since it has a lot of great features other registries lack.

stephenlf 36 minutes ago |

Slick project. Very cool.

theMackabu 2 hours ago |

LATEST RELEASE REQUIRES A STATIC RELEASE HOTFIX!!

https://github.com/theMackabu/ant/actions/runs/29167621329.

im very sorry everyone who tried to install and got a libcares error :(

rvz 2 hours ago | |

ok?

djfobbz 2 hours ago |

I can't get Bun to work under WSL1, which is super annoying. Does Ant support WSL1?

7bit 25 minutes ago | |

Why are you Not using WSL2?

theMackabu 2 hours ago | |

unknown, have not tried. but let me know if it does work

CrzyLngPwd 1 hour ago |

Would not touch thios with someone else's (code/business).

hexsprite 56 minutes ago |

i might try porting this to rust ;)

randall 1 hour ago |

wow! i’ve been using deno for a long time, and one of my fav features is compiling a binary. i didn’t see anything about that, but might have missed something… do you all plan to support this?

theMackabu 1 hour ago | |

yes! I will be making a roadmap like a comment here suggested, should help

deanc 43 minutes ago |

And who are you? Why should we trust you and your runtime?

Reubend 1 hour ago |

Can this engine be embedded into other programs?

dvh 2 hours ago |

What's the benefits over v8?

theMackabu 2 hours ago | |

its ~8mb including the entire runtime and node-compat work. pretty simple to embed anywhere as well

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago |

I have actually known* about Ant for some time from your previous submissions and its really interesting and I wish the project luck!

Do you think that Ant could be used to create a small index.html/css/js project into an desktop app minimally.

I currently found deno desktop which is pretty recent to be the easiest way of doing this for one of my projects (https://epub.mirror.forum) but I found there to be some issues within deno-desktop in terms of some features not working on the desktop app but I overall really like the idea of converting these files into desktop apps and I am wondering if ant could be suitable for that, so I am curious to hear what you think :-D

theMackabu 2 hours ago | |

just got the thing for you actually! literally just finished a stable version last night, https://www.npmjs.com/package/ant-desktop. WIP still, chromium only renderer backend but webview and other backends coming soon as well. no local ant install needed as libant is bundled, when CI finishes ill have windows/linux builds too

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | | |

Oh great! it seems, that great thinkers think alike :-D

Good to see that you are already working on it though, Good luck and I will hopefully try to keep a keen eye on the project for my use-cases when I need something more flexible than rust iced applications but also having a small footprint. It's good to see more competition within this space so good luck with that!

douxx 2 hours ago | |

Ant desktop is currently in development, from what I recall http://ants.land/ant-desktop

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | | |

Hmm, the ants.land website in general isn't resolving for my desktop but it is resolving for my laptop, a bit strange.

It states: Server Not Found, Zen can’t connect to the server at ants.land What can you do about it? Try connecting on a different device. Check your modem or router. Disconnect and reconnect to Wi-Fi.

yet my laptop which also uses zen which is also connected to the same Wi-Fi resolves the page so I am not sure.

gaurang404 1 hour ago |

Damnn, gonna try this for sure

sylware 1 hour ago |

Cannot access the web site: whatwg cartel web engine only.

Is antjs coded in plain and simple C?

esafak 2 hours ago |

I hope you get some collaborators, to increase the bus factor. You might want to write a roadmap to focus efforts.

theMackabu 2 hours ago | |

good idea!

bellowsgulch 2 hours ago |

> Something you could distribute without dragging along hundreds of megabytes of V8 or Node.

Holy crap, V8 is that big now? Very interested in this for embedding purposes.