Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning (opens in new tab)

Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?"

I mourn the death of a human artform.

Maybe it's finally time to move on from being a career programmer.

Congratulations to the OP for the accomplishment.

One of my first assembly projects was a CGI Script 100% in x86 assembly.

A full web server is certainly more impressive! Though I'd recommend to beginners to look up CGI and mod_cgi in Apache first lol

P.S.: I would love a copy of that book please!

Humbling.

In general, stable syscall numbers are just a Linux thing. Everyone else uses blessed system libraries

Really cool project though!

I had a very hard time simply using and even utilizing C++ or Java.

C and Turbo Pascal especially was easier because the compiled code was very much resembling to hand written code.

As the author described, you can do in 4.000 lines what others can do with way less pain in 100.

So you build macros, come up with your own library and in the end you kind of build a meta language build on top of assembly because some lines are so hard to grasp that you delegate working code into a library for reuse.

It is funny how much we take conventions for numbers for granted. If you happen to know assembly and its intricacies you immediately will learn to work with a sign bits which mark negative numbers. But how do you know? Maybe you use the whole addressable space only for positive numbers.

Small things that make a huge different.

Nice article, I enjoyed your adventures and would do the same.

The last time I did anything in assembler was x86 under DOS. Your code makes ARM64 with a modern OS less scary than I thought it would be.

jk. Metal as fuck. Love it.

Nothing beats Go.

When you use HTMLX (goat) + sqlc (goat) + pgx (another goat) + Chi (yet another goat) and Sqlite (goat).

Most apps will not need anything more than Sqlite, i've several sqlite apps doing a couple of million visits per day.

Compiles to signal binary blazingly fast.

Deploy using systemd service, capture logs with alloy / Loki graphana setup, set up alerts and monitoring and go home.

And you can serve millions of requests on a server with 512MB RAM.

I don't think you'd ever need more speed than this.

Everything else is bloated, slow and doesn't give you enough room for optimization.

Here's the latency of one of my hobby projects (network latency not included): https://i.ibb.co/hJ6FQtyw/d3d6c9d15765.png

Request rate: https://i.ibb.co/Fq80nfJ4/67fcdbdb7491.png

It's running in US and EU (helps avoid atlantic routrip tax), in this one i am doing some 100s of checks, not simple CRUD work. With Go you can optimize a lot without complexity of Rust.