ymawky
Infrastructure
web server
SHOW HN2026
How HN took it
6 positive, 1 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 4 critical, out of 12 comments about the project. Thread score +0.18.
Execution: 3 for, 2 againstIdea: 2 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive effort writing the server by hand in assembly
From 2 comments
You wrote this by hand? Impressive.
wewewedxfgdf on HNI love it :-) Back in the distant past I wrote some really big ARM 32 assembly projects. 64 bit ARM is really very similar! I had a look through the code. Some ENTRY/EXIT macros…
nickcw on HN
Pleased to see it ported to Linux
From 1 comment
Ahh, this little gem ported to Linux, great! That opens much more possibilities to play with it, thanks
kunley on HN
Objections
Security concerns about vulnerabilities in assembly code
From 2 comments
> written entirely by-hand in ARM64 assembly as a fun project. It's probably got a lot of vulnerabilities I'm unaware of Impressive, but that second part worries me. I hope one…
mrbluecoat on HNThere's critical security flaws in this web server. Consult your local LLM for a security analysis.
wewewedxfgdf on HN
Assembly is not worth it compared to C for performance or maintenance
From 2 comments
Assembly can provide the best raw performance because it's closer to the hardware. However, writing and maintaining a web server in Assembly takes much more time, and in many…
ntm3c on HNarm64 is an IP-locked ISA, namely it is not worth assembly writting, stick to plain and simple C. RISC-V is. I am self-hosting many of my internet thingies. I plan to move to…
sylware on HN
Requests
Use macros for entry/exit and register renaming for readability
From 1 comment
I love it :-) Back in the distant past I wrote some really big ARM 32 assembly projects. 64 bit ARM is really very similar! I had a look through the code. Some ENTRY/EXIT macros…
nickcw on HN
Questions
Is assembly faster than webservers in other languages?
From 1 comment
Is an assembly webserver more performant than webservers written in other languages? Are there any hard limits on how much you can squeeze when using a particular framework?
Lucasoato on HN
Why MIME types by file extension rather than magic numbers?
From 2 comments
Cool. I particularly like the O'Reilly book cover that never was. Although I fear you may have misunderstood what wasm is... Question/critique. Isn't getting the mime type by…
benj111 on HNYou could argue well, if you have to open the file to read it anyway may as well look for magic numbers. That doesn't work well with text documents which won't have any kind of…
jprjr_ on HN
Alternatives named
nginx
From 1 comment
The language matters much less than the architecture of the web server. A server written in assembly using a fork-on-request model like ymawky is going to be much slower than a…
imtomt on HN
Apache
From 1 comment
You could do that, but it's not really necessary, and adds extra overhead and complexity. And as the other commenter pointed out, it wouldn't work for text file types without…
imtomt on HN
Hiawatha
From 1 comment
> written entirely by-hand in ARM64 assembly as a fun project. It's probably got a lot of vulnerabilities I'm unaware of Impressive, but that second part worries me. I hope one…
mrbluecoat on HN