TinyJS
small apps on Win/Mac/Linux
Details
- External ID
- 49529062
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- TinyJS
- Website domain
- tinyjs.app
- Launched
- Sept. 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5015948963317385
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Description
Hi all. I'm Tarwin. I've been working on TinyJS for about 6 weeks now.I was sick of installing 500mb Electron apps for every little utility. The last straw was Harvest updating from 5mb to 500mb in latest release.Tauri exists (and it's great) but I wanted something that was JS first. So I built this on top of txikijs, a tools that includes QuickJS and SQLite already.TinyJS does what it says it does. Small apps that can do almost anything. 100% JS.As part of building a tool like this I also built a lot of example apps, to test and understand required functionality on all three systems. The two I am most proud of are:amp: like winamp, but with a bunch of extra stuff like being able to play tracker files, and internet radionib: I'd like to think it will soon be the best editor for documentation (specifically) in markdownI've also experimented with re-wrapping many of the apps I already have downloaded. Some just work (Harvest), some possibly could ie Slack. I know some apps will never make sense to use tinyjs but that's ok.I just want to save room on people's ever pricier SSDs! (and make computers fun again with silly things like pigeons that fly across your screen for now reason)
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche developer utilities and toolchains
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight apps for windows mac and linux
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a custom lightweight cross-platform desktop runtime (~6MB) embedding a custom JS engine (txiki.js) and native OS webview APIs across macOS, Windows, and Linux requires deep systems programming (C/Rust/platform bindings). This requires low-level systems and compiler expertise that AI assistants cannot reliably engineer from scratch.
What it would actually take: A real version requires C/C++ or Rust bindings to an embedded ECMAScript runtime like QuickJS or txiki.js, integrated with native platform webview bindings (WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux). The architecture demands custom event loops, IPC channels bridging JS to OS APIs, and multi-platform compilation pipelines. It requires deep systems programming knowledge, binary size optimization skills, and extensive testing across disparate operating systems.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: txiki.js (Node.js alternative, smaller and slower), Claude (AI assistant used in development)
Concerns raised: Markdown editor needs more work before being truly best-in-class for docs, txiki.js performance is slow
Feature requests: Improve markdown editor for documentation use
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 139 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #69 of 140 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 305 days after the earliest competitor.
- Tinykit · hn · 2025-12-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Having fun making mini static site apps · hn · 2026-06-01 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Instant-on tiny ESP32 PC with an editor, compiler, and apps installer · hn · 2026-01-29 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Ant · hn · 2026-05-09 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- PrinceJS · hn · 2025-11-17 · 151 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- GrainJS · hn · 2025-12-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Lilo · hn · 2026-04-24 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I built a minimal open-source CMS (FREE) · hn · 2026-01-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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