ymawky

Infrastructure

web server

SHOW HN2026

Legend

ymawky

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

github.com

#arm64 assembly#static file server#macos#web server in assembly

430points
227comments
#71of 4,366 in 2026
Top 2%of 2026 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

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 HN
    • Your determination to make this happen was remarkable — and you truly accomplished it. Congratulations
      Ati985 on HN
    • This is fucking nuts
      jjbigs on HN
    • This 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 HN
    • With 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 HN
    • I 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 HN
    • 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…
      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 HN
    • 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?
      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 HN
    • This 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 HN
    • 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?
      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
  • 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

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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