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Afterburner

Capability-Sandboxed JavaScript/TS Runtime in Rust

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Hey everyone! I've been working on something called Afterburner: a fast, embeddable JS/TS runtime written in Rust, with a capability sandbox baked right in.Scripts run locked down by default: no network, no filesystem, no environment variables. You explicitly grant whatever access a script actually needs, and every call gets hard caps on CPU, memory, and time.The goal isn't to replace your existing stack. It's to fit cleanly into it:Embed a JS/TS engine in your Rust app with a single crate. Run user scripts, plugins, business rules, or edge logic, each call fully sandboxed. Wrap the tools you already use. Commands like `burn node app.js`, `burn npm test`, `burn bun`, `burn deno run`, and `burn npx tsx` run your existing toolchain under the sandbox. Take an unmodified Express, Fastify, or Hono app and run it with zero ambient I/O and a memory ceiling. No code changes needed. Use the built-in registry at registry.afterburner.sh. Publish with `burn publish`, install with `burn install` or `burn add` dependencies are pinned by content digest. Every package ships with a capability manifest, so installed code is sandboxed by default. It also interops with npm, so you can still pull in npm libraries as needed. Since nothing gets ambient authority, it's also just a clean, practical way to run untrusted code without having to cross your fingers and hope.Repo: https://github.com/afterburner-sh/afterburner Site: https://afterburner.sh Registry: https://registry.afterburner.shThe full walkthrough like how it works, what it can do, and benchmarks hitting up to ~16.8M rows/sec is all in one post. It's the best place to start: https://vertexclique.com/blog/burn-after-reading/One licensing note: it's source-available under BSL-1.1, which automatically converts to Apache-2.0 four years after each release. Free to use for your own projects so go build something.

HN · launched Jun 14, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 69%) · 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 ↗

Could you build this?

No Developing a secure, capability-sandboxed JavaScript/TypeScript runtime from scratch in Rust requires deep systems programming, virtual machine internals, and security engineering.

What it would actually take: The architecture requires integrating an engine like V8 (via deno_core) or QuickJS with Rust, wrapping host system calls in a granular capability security model. The hardest challenges are preventing sandbox escapes, securely managing memory and thread isolation, building a custom module resolver for TypeScript, and correctly sandboxing OS primitives like network and file descriptors. This requires specialized expertise in language runtime design, OS security models, and systems-level Rust.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Feature requests: Supercruise functionality

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 476 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #346 of 477 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 223 days after the earliest competitor.

  • Titan · hn · 2025-12-11 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.53
  • Script: JavaScript That Runs Like Rust · hn · 2026-01-27 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
  • DepsGuard · hn · 2026-06-01 · 40 upvotes · similarity 0.49
  • Firenook · hn · 2026-11-05 · 172 upvotes · similarity 0.48
  • ts-r: A port of TypeScript to Rust · ph · 2026-10-22 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.47
  • Hurry · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.46
  • Shuck · hn · 2026-04-30 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
  • npm · ph · 2026-10-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46

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