Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

This is ymawky, a static file web server for MacOS written entirely in ARM64 assembly. It supports GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, and OPTIONS requests, and supports Range: bytes=X-Y headers (which allows scrubbing for video streaming). It decodes percent-encoded URLs, strictly enforces docroot, serves custom error pages for any HTTP error response, supports directory listing, and has (some) mitigations against slowloris-like attacks.

I’ve also written a more detailed writeup here: https://imtomt.github.io/ymawky/

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trollbridge an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Gave me a warm feeling to know that someone would actually still bother to do this by hand. I'm not the only one!

	▲	imtomt 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you! I've been obsessed with this idea for a while, finally decided to start on it, then obsessed over it for a couple weeks. I'd love to see some of your projects if you have anything similar, I'm glad I'm not the only one too! I think most programmers would benefit a lot from taking a few weeks or months to try and learn some assembly, and demystify how CPUs and compiled languages work.

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digitaltrees 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t know why, but this project has me irrationally excited!

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_the_inflator 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel the guy’s suspicion towards any high level language. I exclusively programmed in assembly on C64, Amiga and the recognized that this ain’t sustainable on PC because there are more and more edge cases or different machine configurations.

I had a very hard time simply using and even utilizing C++ or Java.

C and Turbo Pascal especially was easier because the compiled code was very much resembling to hand written code.

As the author described, you can do in 4.000 lines what others can do with way less pain in 100.

So you build macros, come up with your own library and in the end you kind of build a meta language build on top of assembly because some lines are so hard to grasp that you delegate working code into a library for reuse.

It is funny how much we take conventions for numbers for granted. If you happen to know assembly and its intricacies you immediately will learn to work with a sign bits which mark negative numbers. But how do you know? Maybe you use the whole addressable space only for positive numbers.

Small things that make a huge different.

Nice article, I enjoyed your adventures and would do the same.

	▲	imtomt 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you! The thing about eventually building your own meta language ends up happening all the time with bigger assembly projects. I do have a fair few quality-of-life macros too, but probably fewer than I should. I did end up needing to implement by hand what would be standard functions, things like atoi, itoa, strlen, memcpy, streqn. Higher level languages are more convenient for 99% of things, but the directness of Assembly gives me a rush unlike any other. I didn't live through the C64/Amiga, but I was obsessed with old C64/ZX emulators growing up.

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chrisweekly an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That fake O'Reilly book cover is pure gold.

	▲	imtomt an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That book is exactly what inspired me to make this in the first place, haha. The subtitle of the book gave me the acronym I named it.

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thatxliner an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm wanting to read this repository as a learning tool, so it'd also be nice to include docs—even AI-generated docs, but obvious I'd prefer docs with your own design notes and decisions—about the architecture of the code.

Really cool project though!

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imtomt an hour ago | parent [-]

Thanks, I appreciate it a lot! I tried to comment my code pretty heavily (~3000 lines of code, ~1000 lines of comments all together), since this was a learning project for myself in the first place. Hopefully those will be of some use. But separate in-depth documentation is definitely a good idea, I'll work on adding that. In the meantime I'm always down to answer any questions about it!

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thatxliner 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

My first question would be where should I start reading? It seems like you modularized it into multiple assembly files (how does that even work?)

	▲	imtomt 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, read the main file, ymawky.S first. Then I'd read through get.S maybe, checking parse.S on an as-needed basis for parsing-related functions. delete.S or options.S are pretty short, too, so give those a read too. Modularizing it into multiple files was easier than I expected it to be, you basically have other functions/labels in other files, and mark them as .global at the top. The Makefile compiles each file into their own .o, which you then link all together. You can "b" or "bl" to any label from any other file, as long as it's global and linked together. Same with data in .bss or .data, mark them as .global and they can be accessed from elsewhere.

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OutOfHere 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An agentic LLM should be pretty good at Arm64 assembly generation, but maintainability of large code could become an issue. Why would it not run on Linux?

	▲	shepherdjerred 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The first paragraph of the README says this was hand written so I’m not sure why you’re bringing up LLMs

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jjbigs 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is fucking nuts

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imtomt an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This post seems to now link to the writeup rather than the repository, sorry! The repo can be found at the top of that page, or directly here: https://github.com/imtomt/ymawky

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dang 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

Whoops that was my fault. Fixed now. (I emailed you, btw, that we'd changed your title, but I forgot to switch the URL back to the repo. Both links are cool.)

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has fantasized about doing something like this as a self-soothing enterprise. Kudos to you for actually doing it!

	▲	imtomt 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hey, thank you! Means a lot. It's an odd sort of meditation, but is surprisingly the most almost-therapeutic project I've worked on. Something about the constraints of Assembly that really pull you into the minutiae and clears your head, maybe.