[colinhb]

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?

[CharlesW]

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.

[ksec]

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.

[colinhb]

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

[port11]

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.