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I’m not that deep in the JS ecosystem or runtimes, but I’m a little surprised by some of the claims here about being smaller, having fast starts, sandboxing, performance-competitive, etc.

Does anyone have a sense of what insights, design choices, big bets, etc, unlock all these advantages against already mature and highly optimised JS stacks?

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This project appears to be an LLM-rewritten Elk (https://github.com/cesanta/elk), as noted elsewhere in the thread. That project was established in 2019.

The author also replied elsewhere in the thread that was the initial version but everything has since been deleted and the current version is built from ground up.

Thanks - so much easier to understand what Elk is (and why it is) than Ant.

Deno offers practically everything I see here, but is mature, serious, written before LLMs (not sure about now), and has a solid team behind it.

But okay, it’s not the fastest kid on the block; although “X but faster” isn’t the most compelling argument to adopt a new runtime.

As to the choices this project made: well, Claude or Codex seems to have chosen to copy large parts of the Elk codebase.

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