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

330 points by theMackabu ↗ HN
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.

54 comments

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Imustaskforhelp
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

esafak
I hope you get some collaborators, to increase the bus factor. You might want to write a roadmap to focus efforts.
dvh
What's the benefits over v8?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
bellowsgulch
> 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.

djfobbz
I can't get Bun to work under WSL1, which is super annoying. Does Ant support WSL1?
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`!
skybrian
Could you use the JSR package registry instead of setting up a new one?
egnehots
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?

digitaltrees
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.
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.

randall
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?
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.
Reubend
Can this engine be embedded into other programs?
sylware
Cannot access the web site: whatwg cartel web engine only.

Is antjs coded in plain and simple C?

EvilGoose
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.
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...

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.
hexsprite
i might try porting this to rust ;)