Show HN: Meow – The 4th and final JavaScript runtime and toolchain

Yes, I said final. Fight me in the comments.

But seriously: there are basically exactly 3 serious JS runtimes in the world. (Now 4... or 1, idk).

Why? Because the modern JS ecosystem is a fragmented, bloated nightmare. Node, pnpm, tsc, eslint, prettier, vite. Each spins up its own V8 instance, parses your codebase from scratch, and leaves a graveyard of .json configs in your root directory.

meow squishes it all into one cute 82MB binary. It’s a drop-in Node replacement, ultra-fast package manager, formatter, test runner, linter, checker and bundler.

I didn't write a JS engine from scratch, I'm not that depressed. meow uses V8 for stability and gets Node drop-in compat via deno_node (thanks Deno team).

The secret sauce: meow parses your codebase exactly once into an Oxc AST in memory. That single graph natively feeds the runtime, linter, formatter, typechecker, and bundler. No redundant allocations. Just the fastest JavaScript tooling available, completely unified.

0-Byte Duplicated node_modules (Without Symlink Hell) pnpm is cool, but its symlinks notoriously break framework resolvers. meow downloads to a global cache once, then projects packages using OS-level copy-on-write (macOS APFS clonefile) or parallel hardlinking (Linux/Windows). You get flat, standard node_modules consuming exactly 0 extra bytes on your SSD.

7ms Warm Installs Offloading SHA-512 cryptographic verification to background OS threads means cold installs take ~250ms, warm installs take 7-15ms. And yes, it does it that fast without skipping verification.

It actually runs Next.js & SvelteKit Fast runtimes are a fun parlor trick until they fail to build your app. meow natively boots Next.js 15, Astro, and SvelteKit out of the box with full CommonJS & Node built-in support.

Sandboxed npx by default Running npx create-next-app gives a random script full host access. We shouldn't be letting Shai Hulud run around so freely. meow x (our ephemeral runner) is sandboxed by default. Network is denied, writes are confined to the cwd, and the clock/entropy are frozen. Pass --trust to let it do sketchy stuff.

The UX meow looksmaxxes hard. It looks like a little girl vomited in a TTY. But it intelligently detects non-interactive environments and degrades to clean stdout so you can sneak it into your org without breaking CI/CD.

No cap, it benchmaxxes pretty good too. Like if it were an LLM it'd be mythos class for sure. Benchmarks below.

Install (macOS / Linux): curl -fsSL https://meow.style/install | sh Web: https://meow.style Docs: https://docs.meow.style GitHub: https://github.com/0xchasercat/meow

Okay, who wants to fight me? Come hit me with the "but it don't work with xxxx!1!!!". (But really, if you do encounter an issue, GH issues are welcome).

Disclaimer: meow is still super early stage. You will hit edge cases, but for common apps it works perfectly.

Benchmarks (https://github.com/0xchasercat/fluffybench) Package Manager (Large workspace, Cold / Dedup): Meow: 248ms / 725ms Bun: 2.7s / 3.5s NPM: 36.7s / 55.9s Deno: 46.7s / 55.0s Runtime (HTTP req/s | Regex | Cold Start): Meow: 43.7k req/s | 89ms | 23ms Deno: 42.0k req/s | 90ms | 24ms Node: 40.3k req/s | 99ms | 38ms Bun: 36.2k req/s | 107ms | 16ms

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756038

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