Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

58•theMackabu•1h ago

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.

Comments

Imustaskforhelp•43m ago

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

douxx•38m ago

Ant desktop is currently in development, from what I recall http://ants.land/ant-desktop

Imustaskforhelp•24m ago

Hmm, the ants.land website in general isn't resolving for my desktop but it is resolving for my laptop, a bit strange.

It states: Server Not Found, Zen can’t connect to the server at ants.land What can you do about it? Try connecting on a different device. Check your modem or router. Disconnect and reconnect to Wi-Fi.

yet my laptop which also uses zen which is also connected to the same Wi-Fi resolves the page so I am not sure.

douxx•23m ago

Weird, maybe your DNS settings on your desktop or an extension blocking it?

theMackabu•22m ago

thats very weird, its hosted on cloudflare workers atm. might be blocked by your isp? ive seen that happen to .land

Imustaskforhelp•11m ago

Oh I think that I might be getting it now but I had an custom nextdns profile set up on my browser using nextdns with some more aggressive setups using typosquatting protection etc.

It seems that changing the dns setting made it resolve and afterwards even going back to the same profile is now (resolving it again?) [Could it be that the domain is now cached not needing to go to the dns provider] but I guess that I wouldn't blame you guys about it so much and just wanted to inform y'all of it :-D

> ive seen that happen to .land

interesting, is there any reason behind DNS/(ISP?) providers blocking .land domains?

theMackabu•6m ago

> interesting, is there any reason behind DNS/(ISP?) providers blocking .land domains?

tbh have not seen any reason behind it, just saw my ants.land get blocked a office firewall once while demoing

theMackabu•38m ago

just got the thing for you actually! literally just finished a stable version last night, https://www.npmjs.com/package/ant-desktop. WIP still, chromium only renderer backend but webview and other backends coming soon as well. no local ant install needed as libant is bundled, when CI finishes ill have windows/linux builds too

Imustaskforhelp•32m ago

Oh great! it seems, that great thinkers think alike :-D

Good to see that you are already working on it though, Good luck and I will hopefully try to keep a keen eye on the project for my use-cases when I need something more flexible than rust iced applications but also having a small footprint. It's good to see more competition within this space so good luck with that!

theMackabu•31m ago

esafak•39m ago

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

theMackabu•37m ago

good idea!

dvh•37m ago

What's the benefits over v8?

theMackabu•36m ago

its ~8mb including the entire runtime and node-compat work. pretty simple to embed anywhere as well

theMackabu•29m ago

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 :(

rvz•26m ago

ok?

bellowsgulch•25m ago

> 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.

CharlesW•7m ago

Why not use a runtime designed for embedded applications, like XS? https://moddable.com/documentation/readme

djfobbz•24m ago

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

theMackabu•23m ago

unknown, have not tried. but let me know if it does work

nesarkvechnep•19m ago

You might also try playing the piano. Who knows, you might know how to play.

carimura•23m ago

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`!

skybrian•13m ago

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

randall•5m ago

+1 to this.

egnehots•12m ago

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?

theMackabu•9m ago

many, the engine has basically gone through a full rewrite since feb, that was still mostly interpt and missing many jit ops.

nightly will include benchmarks soon as well

digitaltrees•8m ago

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.

tekacs•6m ago

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 – 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, though. Keep going! Just be careful, folks.

randall•6m ago

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?

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