Have you considered using "Maven" or "Gradle" instead of "Ant" for building and running?

[youngledo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

1. Ant is too old and currently has few projects to use, Maven and Gradle are the mainstream.
2. Using more mainstream and advanced building tools is beneficial for new developers to quickly join in.

[jpstotz]

It is even worse, just Apache Ant isn't enough for building VisualVM. Without a NetBeans installation the Ant build script can't do anything and just outputs an error like You must define 'nbplatform.VisualVM_platform.harness.dir'.