Show HN: Ant – A from-scratch JavaScript runtime in 9 MB

What is Ant? It's my JavaScript runtime, built from scratch over many hours of work. Much effort has gone into keeping the binary size small, around 9MB at the moment (6.5 MB with -Os). On my M4 Pro, the hono coldstart bench (examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js) lands around 5ms, about 2.4x faster than bun, and 5.8x faster than node.

To keep things small, the engine ("Ant Silver") is hand-written, not a wrapper around V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey. The JIT is still a work in progress but it uses a fork of MIR as the backend.

Ant currently targets the WinterTC Minimum Common API, while also passing 100% the javascript-zoo compat-table tests, and is sitting around 64% on test262.

Why did I build Ant? Well, I wanted a runtime small enough to ship with CLI's and small Docker containers without having to drag along 50 to 100mb of just runtime. Ant in its current state is performant enough in some cases to compete with v8, but mostly in specific shapes.

Background on how it got here: https://themackabu.dev/blog/ant-part-two

Online demo shell/container: https://ant.ax

If anyone has questions about Ant, such as the engine, im happy to answer any of them! Feedback is also appreciated, if you run your own code and hit some edge case.