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Ant

A from-scratch JavaScript runtime in 9 MB

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Hey HN! I have been working on Ant for a while now, would love to share around now.What is Ant? It's my JavaScript runtime, built from scratch over many hours of work. Much effort has gone into keeping the binary size small, around 9MB at the moment (6.5 MB with -Os). On my M4 Pro, the hono coldstart bench (examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js) lands around 5ms, about 2.4x faster than bun, and 5.8x faster than node.To keep things small, the engine ("Ant Silver") is hand-written, not a wrapper around V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey. The JIT is still a work in progress but it uses a fork of MIR as the backend.Ant currently targets the WinterTC Minimum Common API, while also passing 100% the javascript-zoo compat-table tests, and is sitting around 64% on test262.Why did I build Ant? Well, I wanted a runtime small enough to ship with CLI's and small Docker containers without having to drag along 50 to 100mb of just runtime. Ant in its current state is performant enough in some cases to compete with v8, but mostly in specific shapes.Background on how it got here: https://themackabu.dev/blog/ant-part-twoOnline demo shell/container: https://ant.axIf anyone has questions about Ant, such as the engine, im happy to answer any of them! Feedback is also appreciated, if you run your own code and hit some edge case.

HN · launched May 9, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 51%) · 0 views

Niche: scripting and execution runtimes · 56 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 56 launches in scripting and execution runtimes →

Could you build this?

No Building a custom JavaScript runtime from scratch that fits within a tiny binary size requires deep systems programming, engine integration, and compiler toolchain expertise.

What it would actually take: The system embeds a lightweight JavaScript engine (such as QuickJS or an embedded V8/JavaScriptCore build) compiled against a custom event loop using low-level I/O primitives (epoll, kqueue, or io_uring). It requires implementing Web standard APIs (fetch, Request, Response, Streams) and Node/Hono-compatible bindings in C or Rust while optimizing compilation flags and stripping unused symbols to maintain sub-10MB binary size. This necessitates deep expertise in systems programming and runtime internals.

Discussion

4 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: LLVM, Cloudflare Workers/V8 isolates, AWS Lambda

Concerns raised: LLVM compilation is slow and doesn't fit JS dynamic execution, Cold start issues in serverless environments, Performance and binary size tradeoffs with JS

Feature requests: Support dynamic development mode with instant code reflection vs static optimized production deployment, Serverless environment optimization to eliminate cold starts, Full Node.js environment compatibility with fast execution

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 301 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #149 of 302 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 192 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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