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
Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
71–80 of 168 posts
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#72The 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.
The "VM-isolated sandbox" is apparently not referring to the JavaScript VM but to a hypervisor, according to the text a bit further down on the page. I wouldn't expect that to be particularly fast or efficient, especially not if you're already running in a VM and have to use nested virtualization (if it's even available).
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#73The 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.
The "VM-isolated sandbox" is apparently not referring to the JavaScript VM but to a hypervisor, according to the text a bit further down on the page. I wouldn't expect that to be particularly fast or efficient, especially not if you're already running in a VM and have to use nested virtualization (if it's even available).
its pretty fast tbh, though third-party benches would be great to have!
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#74The 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.
Deno has that! Come join us :P no affiliation, just a happy user.
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "VM-isolated sandbox" is apparently not referring to the JavaScript VM but to a hypervisor, according to the text a bit further down on the page. I wouldn't expect that to be particularly fast or efficient, especially not if you're already running in a VM and have to use nested virtualization (if it's even available).
its pretty fast tbh, though third-party benches would be great to have!
Is it essentially implementing a paravirtualized OS that runs the JS runtime? Presumably you have to allocate the memory for the VM up front, or how does that work?
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
its pretty fast tbh, though third-party benches would be great to have!
Is it essentially implementing a paravirtualized OS that runs the JS runtime? Presumably you have to allocate the memory for the VM up front, or how does that work?
on linux its kvm, on darwin its hypervisor.framework, the memory is not upfront, by default 256mb is lazy allocated, and ~35mb are used by both ant + the vm. the kernel is https://nanos.org with patches to get ant+networking running smoothly
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#77Why call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org
Ant in JS land is already claimed and huge too lol https://ant.design/
There’s also Adam Ant. Who was also a household name.
Some people have also heard of ants of the formicidaen variety.
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#78Why call it "Ant" and not "Antjs" or "Ant.js" when there is already Ant from Apache? https://ant.apache.org
I thought the same thing as I [half] read the title.
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#79The 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…
> The engine, Ant Silver, is hand-built.
It’s not hand-built. It’s hand prompted.
Re: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem
#80The 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.
Even assuming the worst interpretation, I don't understand how his translates to the trustworthiness of an open source project.