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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.
Discussion (134 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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!
So it's not hand-built?
I, at the very least, need a keyboard.
https://ant.design/
Some people have also heard of ants of the formicidaen variety.
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...
There is no shame in saying it's generated, bun is now completely vibe code also.
Saying it's hand built when it's not is false advertising
I would assume by now most of the code published on Github is hand-built with LLM prompts and armies of AI agents.
• (ant) https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cli
• (claude) https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code
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?
But okay, it’s not the fastest kid on the block; although “X but faster” isn’t the most compelling argument to adopt a new runtime.
As to the choices this project made: well, Claude or Codex seems to have chosen to copy large parts of the Elk codebase.
He forgot to scrub the vendor ID field.
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?
nightly will include benchmarks soon as well
- Another registry (looks like jsr.io)? - Another package manager - Ant Desktop? - Sandboxes? - treatjs (what even is that)?
I'd love to see a JS runtime that does one thing: run JavaScript. I don't get why everyone is aiming for an all-in-one toolbox. To me this project already seems convoluted.
Lots of frontend devs (and vibe coders) just want a "deploy my code" service.
Does `antx` executions are sandboxed by default using `ant:sandbox`?
I'd love to see if I can integrate it onto Edge.js for full Node.js support ( https://edgejs.org )
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.
https://github.com/theMackabu/ant/actions/runs/29167621329.
im very sorry everyone who tried to install and got a libcares error :(
I know some folks love the "purity" of WSL 1 but it's really hard to recommend if you care at all about Linux compatibility.
Failure to do so certainly makes me think the new project isn't very serious.
How is it so much smaller than V8 while also apparently including a package manager, a web server, a TypeScript compiler and a hypervisor?
Much less complex tiers of jit, no unicode ICU, and no startup js snapshot
what are you implying specifically ?
Is antjs coded in plain and simple C?
Odd choice for a vibecoded project.
Not really, there's some advantages if the viber is experienced in C.
1. When the LLM needs to figure out what functions exist, it reads only headers, not the actual implementation. IME the agent uses a fraction of tokens compared to vibing out a Java or C# project.
2. There's only a handful of common footguns in C (signed overflow, use-after-free, dereferencing NULL, etc) all of which are localised, compared to C++ which has all those C footguns plus non-localised footguns that can't be easily detected without knowing the entire program at once.
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
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!
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.
Holy crap, V8 is that big now? Very interested in this for embedding purposes.
V8 21M, Score 47285, ES6 98%
Ant 4.3M, >>> Score 69 <<<, ES6 50%