I code with AI all day, every day. But I do think that it's worth pointing to this issue (from March).

The author has said that they've redone it since, but the "from-scratch hand-built" framing specifically – for me – somewhat grates given the original heavy lifting from an existing AGPL codebase.

https://github.com/cesanta/elk/issues/75

I want to acknowledge that the original authors don't seem to have minded too much – per that thread – after older versions were dropped.

For context, the current code doesn't look like it is the same shape, the same structure, etc., etc. – it _has_ been rewritten since (the 'since Feb' rewrite mentioned adjacent is related to this, AFAICT).

To the author: I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks.

Why call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org

The author shared their experience building the first version in a month: https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month

And then the follow up few months later: https://themackabu.dev/blog/ant-part-two

I'm not sure what the economics of building a new runtime and ecosystem from scratch are but it seems we're already in a phase where individual developers are creating software which previously took a whole team. And its only getting started...

i was just joking about Anthropic's `ant` CLI not caring about Apache `ant` (maybe one person got it), and now we're talking about Javascript `ant`!

I’m not that deep in the JS ecosystem or runtimes, but I’m a little surprised by some of the claims here about being smaller, having fast starts, sandboxing, performance-competitive, etc.

Does anyone have a sense of what insights, design choices, big bets, etc, unlock all these advantages against already mature and highly optimised JS stacks?

What is the serif typeface used on the website? It’s been renamed (I assume) to ant_serif and scrubbed of any other identifiers. It’s very pleasant.

You're stating: "delivers near-V8 speeds"

But according to zoo.js benchmarks that is far from the case:

https://zoo.js.org/

Unless there were major perf gains since 2026-02-10?

The thing that caught my eye immediately was the sandboxing. I have no idea why Node and npm don’t have sandboxing by default. It would greatly help with some of these worms and supply chain attacks.

This is very interesting! The sandboxing and quick startup make this an interesting foundation for a FaaS system.

Lots of frontend devs (and vibe coders) just want a "deploy my code" service.

Looks really good on the surface. But if you really want to sell it, link to a comprehensive benchmark suit and more comparisons. Because if you don't, people tend to (subconsciously) apply adverse inference.

I get the runtime, the engine, and the colony as a monetization angle. What I don't get is:

- Another registry (looks like jsr.io)? - Another package manager - Ant Desktop? - Sandboxes? - treatjs (what even is that)?

I'd love to see a JS runtime that does one thing: run JavaScript. I don't get why everyone is aiming for an all-in-one toolbox. To me this project already seems convoluted.

Could you use the JSR package registry instead of setting up a new one?

Cool project. I am working on a JavaScript dialect for my kids and non technical team members. I’ll target and as a run time.

It's refreshing to see more self-made JS runtimes.

I'd love to see if I can integrate it onto Edge.js for full Node.js support ( https://edgejs.org )

LATEST RELEASE REQUIRES A STATIC RELEASE HOTFIX!!

https://github.com/theMackabu/ant/actions/runs/29167621329.

im very sorry everyone who tried to install and got a libcares error :(

What's the fuzzing story? If this is meant to be a product, hopefully it's being fuzzed 24/7, using multiple state-of-the-art JavaScript fuzzers, against multiple state-of-the-art JavaScript engines?

Great start, clean ergonomics and API surface.

Does `antx` executions are sandboxed by default using `ant:sandbox`?

I can't get Bun to work under WSL1, which is super annoying. Does Ant support WSL1?

The design of the website looks very close to: https://cognition.com

This looks excellent. The sandboxing really stands out to me, and I think ant.land might have potential, since it has a lot of great features other registries lack.

This looks like a great replacement for electron

Appreciate the typography and simple design of the site and its registry.

Seems odd not to acknowledge and differentiate yourself from [apache ant](https://ant.apache.org).

Failure to do so certainly makes me think the new project isn't very serious.

a JS runtime called Ant. we have gone from Node to Deno to Bun to Ant — the naming convention is now just a countdown to the smallest living organism

I don’t really see how you appeal to JavaScript developers with “small binaries”. What is a 50mb runtime you down once next to a 200mb node_modules ?

Would really like to hear the motivation behind why you're building this :)

Does it support WebGPU?

What's the benefits over v8?

The author has supposedly created a company (https://sf.tools/), with a broken /jobs page, and yet is developing the project under their personal GitHub account. Does not look trustworthy.

Slick project. Very cool.

wow! i’ve been using deno for a long time, and one of my fav features is compiling a binary. i didn’t see anything about that, but might have missed something… do you all plan to support this?

if this is trying to competing with v8/llvm thats compiler stuff u gotta be benching and comparing assembly not "hono boot" lol

Can this engine be embedded into other programs?

Coming soon: LLM harness of the day called make

i might try porting this to rust ;)

I see benchmarks for cold start, why there are no benchmarks for runtime performance Vs Node, Deno and Bun? (and quickjs et al.)?

Damnn, gonna try this for sure

Cannot access the web site: whatwg cartel web engine only.

Is antjs coded in plain and simple C?

I have actually known* about Ant for some time from your previous submissions and its really interesting and I wish the project luck!

Do you think that Ant could be used to create a small index.html/css/js project into an desktop app minimally.

I currently found deno desktop which is pretty recent to be the easiest way of doing this for one of my projects (https://epub.mirror.forum) but I found there to be some issues within deno-desktop in terms of some features not working on the desktop app but I overall really like the idea of converting these files into desktop apps and I am wondering if ant could be suitable for that, so I am curious to hear what you think :-D

I hope you get some collaborators, to increase the bus factor. You might want to write a roadmap to focus efforts.

> Something you could distribute without dragging along hundreds of megabytes of V8 or Node.

Holy crap, V8 is that big now? Very interested in this for embedding purposes.

And who are you? Why should we trust you and your runtime?