🐜 Ant

A 8MB JavaScript runtime with 1ms cold starts.

Ant is a lightweight, high-performance JavaScript runtime built from scratch. <br> Fits in your pocket while Delivering near-V8 speeds in a binary smaller than most npm packages.

$ ls -lh ant
-rwxr-xr-x⠀8.1M⠀ant*

Table of contents

• Why Ant?
• Installation
• Spec conformance
• Building Ant
• Security
• Community
• Contributing to Ant

Why Ant?

| | Ant | Node | Bun | Deno | | ------------------- | ----------- | --------- | -------- | --------- | | Binary size | ~8 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 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | WinterTC conformant | ✓ | partial | ✓ | ✓ |

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.

Installation

curl -fsSL https://ant.themackabu.com/install | bash

# or with MbedTLS
curl -fsSL https://ant.themackabu.com/install | MBEDTLS=1 bash

Spec conformance

Ant targets the WinterTC Minimum Common API specification, the standard for server-side JavaScript interoperability developed by Ecma TC55.

| Suite | Pass rate | Notes | | ---------------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------ | | js-zoo (ES1–ES5) | ~100% | | | js-zoo (ES6) | ~80%* | *Generators unsupported | | js-zoo (ES2016+) | ~90% | | | test262 | ~50% | Improving, focus is on real-world coverage |

Building Ant

See BUILDING.md for instructions on how to build Ant from source and a list of supported platforms.

Security

For information on reporting security vulnerabilities in Ant, see SECURITY.md.

Community

• Discord
• Blog: Building Ant
• DeepWiki: Ant internals

Contributing to Ant

We welcome contributions through pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details. <br> For information about the governance of Ant, see GOVERNANCE.md.