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acornjs
acorn
JavaScript2016–2025
acornjs / acorn

acorn

A small, fast, JavaScript-based JavaScript parser

Web DevelopmentLanguages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
9Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
11.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A small, fast, JavaScript-based JavaScript parser

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-03-22 17:15:56 UTC to 2025-11-15 08:54:55 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

9 sources
yokljo·Nov 15, 2025
Nice. I built something basically just like this for work for the same reason last year. It only look a few hours though, cause I just used Acorn [0] to parse my JS, then directly evaluated the AST. It also had an iteration limit and other configurable limits so I can eval stuff in the browser without crashing the tab. I did not use an LLM. [0]: https://github.com/acornjs/acorn
In Designing a Language (2017)
CMay·Sep 20, 2025
On the other hand, their actual dependency list looks closer to this, and this is definitely not comprehensive: https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor https://github.com/Microsoft/tslib https://github.com/codemirror https://github.com/codemirror/autocomplete https://github.com/codemirror/language https://github.com/marijnh/style-mod https://github.com/marijnh/crelt https://github.com/marijnh/find-cluster-break https://github.com/marijnh/w3c-keyname https://github.com/cure53/DOMPurify https://github.com/electron/electron https://github.com/electron/get https://github.com/debug-js/debug https://github.com/vercel/ms https://github.com/sindresorhus/env-paths https://github.com/sindresorhus/got https://github.com/sindresorhus/is https://github.com/visionmedia/node-progress https://github.com/npm/node-semver https://github.com/malept/sumchecke
Read the rest
r https://github.com/szmarczak/http-timer https://github.com/szmarczak/defer-to-connect https://github.com/szmarczak/cacheable-lookup https://github.com/jaredwray/cacheable https://github.com/biomejs/biome https://github.com/sindresorhus/decompress-response https://github.com/sindresorhus/mimic-response https://github.com/octet-stream/form-data-encoder https://github.com/szmarczak/http2-wrapper https://github.com/szmarczak/resolve-alpn https://github.com/sindresorhus/lowercase-keys https://github.com/sindresorhus/p-cancelable https://github.com/sindresorhus/responselike https://github.com/sindresorhus/type-fest https://github.com/sindresorhus/tagged-tag https://github.com/max-mapper/extract-zip https://github.com/sindresorhus/get-stream https://github.com/Sec-ant/readable-stream https://github.com/sindresorhus/is-stream https://github.com/thejoshwolfe/yauzl https://github.com/brianloveswords/buffer-crc32 https://github.com/andrewrk/node-pend https://github.com/i18next/i18next https://github.com/babel/babel https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript https://github.com/lezer-parser https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid https://github.com/moment/moment https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js https://github.com/pixijs/pixijs https://github.com/mapbox/earcut https://github.com/primus/eventemitter3 https://github.com/matt-way/gifuct-js https://github.com/matt-way/jsBinarySchemaParser https://github.com/kaimallea/isMobile https://github.com/browserslist/caniuse-lite https://github.com/jkroso/parse-svg-path https://github.com/avoidwork/tiny-lru https://github.com/PrismJS/prism/ https://github.com/mourner/rbush https://github.com/mourner/quickselect https://github.com/remarkjs/remark https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js https://github.com/barrysteyn/node-scrypt https://github.com/nodejs/nan https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown https://github.com/mixmark-io/domino https://github.com/webpack/webpack https://github.com/acornjs/acorn https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo/acorn-import-phases https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist https://github.com/web-platform-dx/baseline-browser-mapping https://github.com/kilian/electron-to-chromium https://github.com/chicoxyzzy/node-releases https://github.com/browserslist/update-db https://github.com/lukeed/escalade https://github.com/alexeyraspopov/picocolors https://github.com/samccone/chrome-trace-event https://github.com/webpack/enhanced-resolve https://github.com/isaacs/node-graceful-fs https://github.com/webpack/tapable https://github.com/guybedford/es-module-lexer https://github.com/eslint/js https://github.com/browserify/events https://github.com/fitzgen/glob-to-regexp https://github.com/isaacs/node-graceful-fs https://github.com/npm/json-parse-even-better-errors https://github.com/webpack/loader-runner https://github.com/jshttp/mime-types https://github.com/jshttp/mime-db https://github.com/suguru03/neo-async https://github.com/webpack/schema-utils https://github.com/ajv-validator/ajv https://github.com/epoberezkin/fast-deep-equal https://github.com/fastify/fast-uri https://github.com/epoberezkin/json-schema-traverse https://github.com/floatdrop/require-from-string https://github.com/ajv-validator/ajv-formats https://github.com/ajv-validator/ajv-keywords https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped https://github.com/webpack-contrib/terser-webpack-plugin https://github.com/jridgewell/sourcemaps https://github.com/jestjs/jest https://github.com/yahoo/serialize-javascript https://github.com/browserify/randombytes https://github.com/terser/terser https://github.com/tj/commander.js https://github.com/evanw/node-source-map-support https://github.com/LinusU/buffer-from https://github.com/mozilla/source-map https://github.com/webpack/watchpack https://github.com/webpack/webpack-sources https://github.com/eemeli/yaml
In Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks
kevlened·Apr 12, 2022
This is a powerful idea! If I understand Monocle's use case, JS has similar AST parsing and code generation tools that are used broadly. There may be some ideas to learn from that community. JS AST specs: estree [0] and babel's AST [1] Parsers: babel [2], acorn [3], or espree [4] Transformers: babel, recast [5], or jscodeshift [6] Codegen: babel or escodegen [7] [0] https://github.com/estree/estree [1] https://babeljs.io/docs/en/babel-parser#output [2] https://github.com/babel/babel [3] https://github.com/acornjs/acorn [4] https://github.com/eslint/espree [5] https://github.com/benjamn/recast [6] https://github.com/facebook/jscodeshift [7] https://github.com/estools/escodegen
In Show HN: Monocle – bidirectional code generation library

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