Show HN: Website is served from a 200KB binary

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

reallyreason•about 1 hour ago

Clicked through to the custom language it's implemented in ("Freedomlang") and was met with a bunch of really confusing AI-authored stuff.

> macOS emits x86-64 AT&T assembly

Seems like an obvious issue given that Apple makes no x86 machines, hasn't for three years, and plans to sunset Rosetta 2 in one year. The whole conceit of this "Freelang" project is that it has no "magic", and then incredibly just a bit further down the README states it has a stop-the-world mark/sweep garbage collector. That is quite magical, no? After reading the GitHub I confess I don't even understand what "magic" the authors are even complaining about. Honestly it seems like it's basically the same concept as Go, vibe-coded, with more pretense, worse syntax, and without the benefit of Google engineering.

You could implement the same functionality in Rust, using a custom target JSON without any libstd/libc. I've done so. It just requires that you accept some limitations and build your own abstractions around unsafe syscalls.

keepamovin•about 1 hour ago

x86-64 works on aarch64, which is also planned.

It's a blocking collection but not 'stop the world' (no world, all separate processes). The pause scales about linearly with heap size, as a full mark-and-sweep should:

  ┌──────────────────┬─────────────┐
  │       heap       │ worst pause │
  ├──────────────────┼─────────────┤
  │ 2MB              │ 0.10 ms     │
  ├──────────────────┼─────────────┤
  │ 8MB (production) │ 0.66 ms     │
  ├──────────────────┼─────────────┤
  │ 32MB             │ 2.47 ms     │
  └──────────────────┴─────────────┘

PhilipRoman•about 2 hours ago

Does the server also handle TLS internally, or is it behind a proxy? For comparison, statically linked darkhttpd is around 138K

keepamovin•about 1 hour ago

No it's pure HTTP: https://github.com/DO-SAY-GO/freelang/blob/main/examples/200...

TLS is CloudFlare which also absorbs a little bit of load in case anyone tries to destroy it.

copper-float•about 1 hour ago

I hate how all the text is AI generated slop. It makes me think they don't actually care about what they're doing, or that they didn't do it at all.

Show HN: Website is served from a 200KB binary

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews