A 7MB JavaScript runtime with 1ms cold starts.
Ant is a lightweight, high-performance JavaScript runtime built from scratch.
Fits in your pocket while Delivering near-V8 speeds in a binary smaller than most npm packages.
$ ls -lh ant
-rwxr-xr-xโ 5.2Mโ ant*
| Ant | Node | Bun | Deno | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binary size | ~7 MB | ~120 MB | ~60 MB | ~90 MB |
| Cold start | ~3-5 ms | ~30-50 ms | ~5-10 ms | ~20-30 ms |
| Engine | Ant Silver | V8 | JSC | V8 |
| JIT | โ | โ | โ | โ |
| WinterTC conformant | partial | partial | โ | โ |
Ant is designed for environments where size and startup time matter: serverless functions, edge computing, embedded systems, CLI tools, and anywhere you'd want JavaScript but can't afford a 50MB+ runtime.
The engine, Ant Silver is hand-built, not a wrapper around V8, JSC, or SpiderMonkey. The JIT compiler uses MIR, a lightweight JIT backend that enables compiled performance in a fraction of the binary size of traditional JIT engines.
curl -fsSL https://ant.themackabu.com/install | bash
# or with MbedTLS
curl -fsSL https://ant.themackabu.com/install | MBEDTLS=1 bashAnt plans to fully target the WinterTC Minimum Common API specification, the standard for server-side JavaScript interoperability developed by Ecma TC55.
| Suite | Pass rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| js-zoo (ES1โES5) | ~100% | |
| js-zoo (ES6) | ~80%* | *Generators unsupported |
| js-zoo (ES2016+) | ~85% | |
| test262 | ~40% | Improving, focus is on real-world coverage |
See BUILDING.md for instructions on how to build Ant from source and a list of supported platforms.
For information on reporting security vulnerabilities in Ant, see SECURITY.md.
We welcome contributions through pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.
For information about the governance of Ant, see GOVERNANCE.md.
