Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#41

Post by sylware » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

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

Is antjs coded in plain and simple C?

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#42

Post by EvilGoose » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

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.

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#43

Post by m3h » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

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...

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#44

Post by CrzyLngPwd » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#45

Post by theMackabu » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

carimura wrote: post #19

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 dont know a single soul who uses the Anthropic `ant` cli....

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#46

Post by tobr » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

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.

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#47

Post by gandreani » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #22

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

I agree! It seems the author is already making thoughtful decisions on what to implement and what to drop. You kinda have to when it's a project of this scope.

Implementing, running, maintaining, scaling a module registry is probably not worth the time. Unless there's a clear technical requirement from the runtime. I would think there isn't since npm protocol compatibility is a stated goal/feature.

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#48

Post by hexsprite » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

i might try porting this to rust ;)

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#49

Post by gandreani » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

#50

Post by magicalist » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

tekacs wrote: post #28

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 m…

Ok, but this post: https://themackabu.dev/blog/js-in-one-month

isn't the post of someone who just implemented a js engine (it reads like someone who asked an LLM to write a blog post about the git log of a different LLM which was apparently lifting code from a different js engine...)

It's a bit hard to understand what's going on here, but definitely hard to trust the project.