Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

thisislife2•about 2 hours ago

This is an interesting project - kudos for executing it. I have to admit that when I was starting out in this field, I too fantasised about, "Would this software be faster, smaller and better in assembly?". Ofcourse, assembly programming made some sense in embedded electronics, which can be very resource constrained and even specialised for one particular application. Thinking from that aspect, perhaps you should consider making this a specialised program that runs on something like a Raspberry Pi - running such a web server directly on it, without an OS (or a very minimal OS), would make for a real cool and interesting project.

senfiaj•42 minutes ago

IMHO, for servers IO (FS/DB, network, etc) is usually a greater bottleneck. Microoptimizations make sense only for CPU bound problems.

jvanderbot•39 minutes ago

I am pained to think of TLS/HTTPS implemented as a hobby project in ASM, but would be impressed to see it.

LegionMammal978•34 minutes ago

I did actually make an attempt at that once for BGGP5 [0]. (That is, making a minimal, horribly insecure 'client' implementing just enough behavior to get a response from a server.) But I got demoralized by how much space the binary blobs for the crypto algorithms took up, in comparison to the actual machine code.

[0] https://binary.golf/5/

grebc•20 minutes ago

https://2ton.com.au/rwasa/

hatefulheart•33 minutes ago

What on earth are you talking about? Assembly makes sense in desktop computing as well. Have you ever, for example, watched a video? What do you think powers the codecs, JSX?

xnorswap•10 minutes ago

I'd assume most are written in C or some other higher level language. Certainly I checked the x264 ( VLC implementation of h264 ) and that is C.

pixelesque•about 1 hour ago

Previous comments from two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587

Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews