A JS runtime's 'built from scratch' claim ran into a months-old GitHub issue
theMackabu's Show HN for Ant, a JavaScript runtime bundled with its own package registry, sandboxing and desktop layer, climbed to 301 points within a day. In the thread, engineers ran the site's 'near-V8 speeds' line against an outside benchmark project, and one commenter traced the 'hand-built from scratch' engine back to a GitHub issue about an existing AGPL codebase.
Ant is a solo-built JavaScript runtime and ecosystem: an engine, a package registry, sandboxing and even a desktop-app layer, pitched as near-V8 speed in a fraction of the download size of Node or Deno.
The Show HN thread pushed back on both fronts: an outside benchmark project contradicting the speed claim, and a GitHub issue tying the 'from-scratch' engine to an existing AGPL codebase, plus blunt questions about who's behind the project and its unfinished company site.
theMackabu's pitch: an engine, a registry, a sandbox, all under one Show HN
theMackabu, posting from a personal GitHub account rather than any company page, put Ant on Show HN as a JavaScript runtime and ecosystem. The scope goes well past running .js files: in a line of the site's own copy relayed in the thread, Ant is pitched as something you could "distribute without dragging along hundreds of megabytes of V8 or Node." Bundled in: a package registry called ant.land, a package manager called antx, sandboxing that isolates code by default (ant:sandbox), a desktop-app layer, a project called treatjs, and a monetization plan the site labels a "colony." The headline performance claim, also quoted in the thread: Ant "delivers near-V8 speeds."
The name picked a fight it didn't need to. Apache has shipped a build tool called Ant since 2000, and several commenters asked why the JS project didn't call itself antjs or ant.js to sidestep the collision.
That's a wide surface for one maintainer to ship and defend at once, and the thread went after it point by point.
The near-V8 claim meets an outside benchmark
One reader turned the site's own tagline back on it:
"You're stating: 'delivers near-V8 speeds' But according to zoo.js benchmarks that is far from the case... Unless there were major perf gains since 2026-02-10?"
Further down, another reader flagged the same gap from a different angle: the site shows cold-start numbers but nothing measuring sustained runtime throughput against Node, Deno, Bun or QuickJS. No reply from theMackabu addressing either point appears among the comments captured here.
A GitHub issue complicates the built-from-scratch story
A second challenge went after the origin story rather than the numbers.
"The author has said that they've redone it since, but the 'from-scratch hand-built' framing specifically – for me – somewhat grates given the original heavy lifting from an existing AGPL codebase." — an engineer who traced the engine's lineage to a GitHub issue on the AGPL-licensed elk project
He added the caveat himself: the current codebase "doesn't look like it is the same shape" as the original, and he still wanted the project to succeed: "I absolutely love what you're doing overall. Keep going! Just be careful, folks." Ant's creator replied elsewhere in the thread the same day, with a fix notice rather than a rebuttal:
"LATEST RELEASE REQUIRES A STATIC RELEASE HOTFIX!!... im very sorry everyone who tried to install and got a libcares error :("
Nothing in the thread as captured answers the AGPL provenance question directly.
A broken jobs page and a personal GitHub account
A third line of doubt skipped the code entirely and went for identity.
A full-stack software engineer in the thread asked the blunt version:
"And who are you? Why should we trust you and your runtime?"
A reader who looked up the company registered behind the project found more to back the doubt:
"The 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."
One developer, a full toolbox, and diligence that hasn't caught up
Not every reaction was skeptical. A commenter who dug up the author's own blog posts found they describe building the first version of Ant in a single month, then rewriting it over the following months:
"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 only getting started..." — Chief Product Architect at APIMatic
That's the real story underneath the pile of "yet another runtime" jokes: a single developer can now ship an engine, a registry, a sandbox and a desktop layer fast enough to top the front page before anyone outside the project independently verifies a single benchmark or line of provenance. The pitch moves at build speed; the diligence is still catching up.
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