Yantra · यन्त्र · the machine

Software, rebuilt from the machine up.

What if an app carried only itself? No browser. No framework. No 300 MB of machinery. Just your idea, compiled and running natively on the Yantra engine.

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The film · 3 min

Dear Web, we need to talk.

A letter from Sanskar. Every Yantra app in it is real and running.
How did a button get this heavy?
1991

Every era added a layer. Nobody took one away.

  1. 1991Pages. HTML shares documents.
  2. 1995Scripts. JavaScript makes pages move.
  3. 2004Web apps. Mail, maps and docs move into the browser.
  4. 2010Frameworks. Countless JavaScript frameworks, libraries, virtual DOMs and build tools, each one a layer on the last.
  5. 2013A browser in every app. Desktop apps become web pages, each carrying its own browser.
  6. TodayAI writes the apps. The app itself is the little sketch on top. Everything under it is weight.

The web was built for pages. Yantra is built for everything after.

The problem

Your chat app is carrying a whole browser.

So is your editor. So is your music player. Each ships its own copy of Chromium, 364 MB of machinery to draw a few buttons, and your laptop runs a dozen of them at once.

Measured on the founder's laptop, 25 Sep 2026: Chrome, 40 processes, 3.8 GB · a chat desktop app, 15 processes, 2.5 GB · a code editor, 6 processes, 1.0 GB.

Look inside a real app

Guess how much of this is the actual app.

We took a shipping Electron app apart, file by file, and measured every piece.

1.7 KB. The little sketch on top. The other 364.3 MB is machinery.

Electron 43 dist folder. Every size is measured; the bars beside the labels are to scale.

Now watch

Keep the app. Lose the machine.

212KB

Everything else turns to dust. What's left is one compiled module: the whole app.

Runs today · examples/counter.wasm
Remember when software was fast?

Back to the limits of the machine.

Games still fight for every frame. Apps stopped trying. Yantra compiles your app ahead of time and runs it natively on the Yantra engine, drawn straight on the GPU. No browser to boot. No DOM. No virtual DOM.

Today the engine draws with Skia on SDL3 (layout: Yoga; apps run in wasmtime).

Now open ten of them

Ten apps. One engine.

Ten Electron apps
3.64 GB
Ten Yantra apps
0.26 GB

Yantra's shared engine is 259 MB today, paid once across all apps. Each app adds only its own module: counter is 212 KB, typewriter 421 KB, gallery 423 KB, lesson 410 KB.

Read one side. Then the other.

One language for everything on a screen.

Yantra is built on Nim: typed, compiled, readable. Everything is imported for you. State, data, motion, documents, sheets, film and physics are part of the language, not libraries you glue together. Tap a marked line to see what it does.

Yantra

          
The web

From a button to a film, one language.

What is that app doing right now?

Every app asks first.

A normal desktop app can read your files the moment it starts. A Yantra app can't touch your files, camera or network until you say yes, with one line in its manifest.

In development
The platform

Change the app while you use it.

  • Live. Describe a change and AI rewrites the running app in place. No rebuild, no reload, nothing you were doing is lost.
  • Checked. Every edit is type-checked and tested before it lands. When something breaks, Yantra finds the error and fixes it.
  • Still yours. The code stays short enough to read, so you can change anything by hand. AI helps. You never depend on it.
Designed · the platform we're building
And apps are only the first thing it makes

Apps today. Documents, sheets, films and worlds next.

AppsMotion timelineWeb runner3DDocumentsSpreadsheetsFilmGamesPhones & headsets
Roadmap

Now, next, and everything after.

Now

The language, the native engine for 2D, 3D, text, sound and video, sealed apps of a few hundred kilobytes, live reload, a film renderer.

Next

A public alpha where apps open from a link, the open-source JavaScript runner, and our own model that writes Yantra apps.

Later

Yantra Office, games, phones and headsets, and a store where creators sell.

Made in India

Build what comes after the web.

The first builders shape the language. Get in before everyone else.

We'll only write to tell you when the first builds open. Or write to us: me@sanskar.app