Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Ant is a lightweight, 9 MB JavaScript runtime with a hand-built engine and npm compatibility.
Ant is a portable, 9 MB JavaScript runtime built from scratch with its own engine, Ant Silver, not a V8, JSC, or SpiderMonkey wrapper. It claims cold starts of 5.4 ms, packages installed up to 40x faster than npm, and direct TypeScript execution without a build step. Features include a VM-isolated sandbox with KVM/hypervisor security and an npm-compatible registry at ants.land. It runs real npm packages and is available for macOS and Linux on arm64 and x86_64.
What commenters are saying
Commenters were split between appreciation for Ant's small footprint and concerns about its performance and origins. Some praised the tiny binary for embedding and desktop apps (via ant-desktop), while others pointed to zoo.js benchmarks showing Ant scoring only 69 with 50% ES6 compliance versus V8's 47,285. The author claimed a full engine rewrite since February. A commenter flagged that early code (December 2025) was lifted from the AGPL-licensed Elk engine, which the author acknowledged and said was deleted and rewritten by February. Multiple commenters complained the name conflicts with Apache Ant and Ant Design.