Ant – A JavaScript Runtime and Ecosystem

Name: Ant – A JavaScript Runtime and Ecosystem
Availability: InStock
Author: theMackabu

by theMackabu·Jul 11, 2026·105 points·43 comments

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AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardryZero to OneBold Bet

Hand-built JS engine with KVM sandboxing that starts 5x faster than Bun.

Strengths

•Hand-built engine achieves 100% test262 compliance without wrapping V8 or JSC.
•Hardware-isolated sandboxes use KVM/Hypervisor.framework for true untrusted code execution.
•Cold start times of 5.4ms significantly outperform Node, Deno, and Bun benchmarks.

Weaknesses

•Building a new JS engine from scratch faces massive ecosystem adoption hurdles.
•Long-term maintenance burden of a custom engine versus leveraging existing V8 updates.

Post Description

Hello HN!

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.