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Ant is a high-performance JavaScript runtime built from scratch — not a wrapper around V8, JSC, or SpiderMonkey. Its engine, Ant Silver, pairs with a fork of the MIR JIT compiler to deliver near-compiled performance in a binary that weighs around 9 MB and starts in approximately 5 milliseconds. If you’ve been reaching for Node, Bun, or Deno but found them too heavy for your use case, Ant is worth a look.

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Why Ant?

Most JavaScript runtimes inherit their size and startup overhead from the engines they embed. Ant takes a different path: Ant Silver is a hand-built engine designed to be small and fast from the ground up. The result is a runtime that’s a fraction of the size of its peers while remaining WinterTC conformant.
WinterTC refers to the WinterTC Minimum Common API specification — the standard for server-side JavaScript interoperability developed by Ecma TC55.

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Ant vs. the alternatives

AntNodeBunDeno
Binary size~9 MB~120 MB~60 MB~90 MB
Cold start~5 ms~31 ms~13 ms~25 ms
EngineAnt SilverV8JSCV8
JIT✓✓✓✓
WinterTC conformant✓partial✓✓
Cold start times are measured by importing Hono, registering routes, and exiting — benchmarked with hyperfine (10 warmup runs, 100 timed runs) on Apple M4 Pro, macOS 15.

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What you can build with Ant

Ant is designed for environments where binary size and startup time are constraints, not afterthoughts.

Serverless functions

The ~5 ms cold start makes Ant a natural fit for function-as-a-service platforms where every millisecond of initialization counts.

Edge computing

A ~9 MB binary deploys easily to resource-constrained edge nodes without the overhead of a full V8 or JSC runtime.

Embedded systems

Ant’s small footprint makes it viable in environments where a 50 MB+ runtime is simply not an option.

CLI tools

Fast startup and a self-contained binary mean your CLI scripts launch instantly and ship as a single file.

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Key capabilities

Ant supports the patterns you already know from other runtimes:
  • TypeScript — run .ts files directly with no transpilation step or config file required
  • npm packages — install and import packages from the npm registry via ant add
  • HTTP server — export a { fetch(req) } object as the default export to start a WinterTC-compatible HTTP server
  • FFI — call native libraries from JavaScript
  • WebAssembly — run .wasm modules natively
  • Embeddable — embed Ant into your own application via the C API in libant/

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The engine

Ant Silver is the JavaScript engine at the core of Ant. It handles parsing, compilation, and execution entirely independent of V8, JSC, or SpiderMonkey. JIT compilation is provided by a fork of MIR, a lightweight backend that compiles hot paths to native code, delivering performance that approaches ahead-of-time compiled languages for compute-heavy workloads.

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Get started

Ready to try Ant? Head to the installation guide to get the binary on your machine in under a minute.