ymawky
Infrastructure
web server
SHOW HN2026
How HN took it
37 positive, 20 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 12 critical, out of 69 comments about the project. Thread score +0.47.
Idea: 15 for, 8 againstExecution: 4 for, 4 againstDesign: 3 for, 0 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 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
Admiration for the craft and assembly-level skill
From 4 comments
It's a beautiful project, well crafted. To reflect to the other comments, projects like this are more like a Minecraft map for me. There are giant and amazing maps, small…
matteohorvath on HNYour determination to make this happen was remarkable — and you truly accomplished it. Congratulations
Ati985 on HNThis is fucking nuts
jjbigs on HNThis looks genuinely great. Well done.
souro26 on HN
Fun, unusual project that feels refreshing amid AI coding
From 3 comments
We are moving to AI and stopped writing code / scratching our heads, and you're here writing a web server in assembly. Humbling.
ybouane on HNWith the bubble of LLMs, these projects are really appreciated. Keep up the good work! P.S.: I would love a copy of that book please!
dalleh on HNI don’t know why, but this project has me irrationally excited!
digitaltrees on HN
Clean Makefile and readable code comments
From 2 comments
What I love most about your project is the super clean Makefile (https://github.com/imtomt/ymawky/blob/main/Makefile). It is a great template to jump start an ARM64 assembly…
ontouchstart on HNThanks, 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…
imtomt on HN
Objections
Not portable: macOS-only syscalls and conventions
From 2 comments
If it is written in assembly, why is it for MacOS only?
shevy-java on HNAn 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?
OutOfHere on HN
Likely much slower than production servers due to fork-per-connection
From 1 comment
Honestly haven't benchmarked it, but I would imagine ymawky would be considerably slower than most fully-featured web servers. ymawky uses fork-per-connection, which is…
imtomt on HN
Test suite and benchmarks absent
From 1 comment
Even though it's a meaningless comparison, I'd be interested to see how performance compares (max requests per second?) for this compared to fully-featured web servers.
dddddaviddddd on HN
Requests
Add in-depth architecture docs and a blog post
From 2 comments
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…
thatxliner on HNThis is awesome! I'll have to try reading through the code when I have more time. It would be awesome to read a blog post about the project. Your approach, lessons learned,…
scuff3d on HN
Port to Linux
From 2 comments
Need a straight binary port now
xyst on HNAn 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?
OutOfHere on HN
Benchmark against other servers
From 1 comment
Even though it's a meaningless comparison, I'd be interested to see how performance compares (max requests per second?) for this compared to fully-featured web servers.
dddddaviddddd on HN
Questions
Why is it macOS only if written in assembly?
From 1 comment
If it is written in assembly, why is it for MacOS only?
shevy-java on HN
What was the hardest part to implement?
From 1 comment
What was the hardest part, Range header handling or the slowloris mitigations? Both seem like they'd be a nightmare without higher-level state machines.
ksi23 on HN
Resources to learn ARM assembly?
From 1 comment
Awesome. Any resource recommendations to learn ARM assembly?
rogeliodh on HN
Alternatives named
asmhttpd (x86 Linux minimal assembly server)
From 1 comment
This is fun, thanks for sharing. I have a much more minimalist one for x86 Linux if you want to see what that looks like: https://github.com/jcalvinowens/asmhttpd
jcalvinowens on HN
nginx and Apache
From 1 comment
Honestly haven't benchmarked it, but I would imagine ymawky would be considerably slower than most fully-featured web servers. ymawky uses fork-per-connection, which is…
imtomt on HN
rwasa
From 1 comment
do you know about rwasa? https://2ton.com.au/rwasa/ ...
polotics on HN