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# 🐜 Ant
_An ant carries 50× its weight. So does this one._
Ant is a lightweight, high-performance JavaScript runtime built from scratch. <br>
Built to carry more than it weighs while delivering near-V8 speeds.
```bash
$ ls -lh ant
-rwxr-xr-x⠀9.0M⠀ant*
# built with -Os
-rwxr-xr-x⠀6.5M⠀ant*
```
## Table of contents
- [Why Ant?](#why-ant)
- [Installation](#installation)
- [Benchmarks](#benchmarks)
- [Spec conformance](#spec-conformance)
- [Building Ant](#building-ant)
- [Security](#security)
- [Community](#community)
- [Contributing to Ant](#contributing-to-ant)
## Why Ant?
| | Ant | Node | Bun | Deno |
| ------------------- | ---------- | ------- | ------ | ------ |
| Binary size | **~9 MB** | ~120 MB | ~60 MB | ~90 MB |
| Cold start | **~5 ms** | ~31 ms | ~13 ms | ~25 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 a fork of [MIR](https://github.com/themackabu/mir), a lightweight backend that enables near compiled performance.
## Installation
```bash
curl -fsSL https://ant.themackabu.com/install | bash
```
## Spec conformance
Ant targets the [WinterTC Minimum Common API](https://min-common-api.proposal.wintertc.org/) specification, the standard for server-side JavaScript interoperability developed by Ecma TC55.
| Suite | Pass rate | Notes |
| ---------------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------ |
| js-zoo (ES1–ES5) | ~100% | |
| js-zoo (ES6) | ~82% | |
| js-zoo (ES2016+) | ~86% | |
| js-zoo (overall) | **88%** | 1211/1368 passing |
| test262 | ~50% | Improving, focus is on real-world coverage |
## Benchmarks
### Cold start
Measures the time to import [Hono](https://hono.dev), register routes, and exit. Each runtime loads the same `bench-coldstart.js` script from `examples/npm/hono/` that creates a Hono app with two routes, prints "ready", and calls `process.exit(0)`. No HTTP server is actually started, this isolates module resolution and initialization overhead.
Measured with hyperfine (10 warmup runs, 100 timed runs):
```bash
hyperfine --warmup 10 --runs 100 \
'ant examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js' \
'node examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js' \
'bun examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js' \
'deno run --allow-read --allow-env examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js'
```
| Runtime | Mean | Min | Max | Relative |
| ------- | ---------- | ------- | -------- | ------------ |
| **Ant** | **5.7 ms** | 5.0 ms | 7.3 ms | **1.00** |
| Bun | 12.8 ms | 11.6 ms | 16.4 ms | 2.24× slower |
| Deno | 24.8 ms | 22.2 ms | 29.4 ms | 4.32× slower |
| Node | 31.1 ms | 27.1 ms | 151.7 ms | 5.41× slower |
<details>
<summary>Environment</summary>
| Detail | Value |
| -------- | --------------------------------- |
| Hardware | Apple M4 Pro, 24 GB RAM, 14 cores |
| OS | macOS 15.7.5 (arm64) |
| Ant | 0.9.1 |
| Node | 25.9.0 |
| Bun | 1.3.13 |
| Deno | 2.7.12 |
</details>
## Building Ant
See [BUILDING.md](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](SECURITY.md).
## Community
- [Discord](http://discord.gg/CH7YSjWGzY)
- [Blog: Building Ant](https://s.tail.so/js-in-one-month)
- [DeepWiki: Ant internals](https://deepwiki.com/theMackabu/ant)
## Contributing to Ant
We welcome contributions through pull request. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) for more details. <br>
For information about the governance of Ant, see [GOVERNANCE.md](GOVERNANCE.md).

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