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

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

#41

Post by ericbarrett »

faangguyindia wrote: post #37
plusplusungood wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point?

You don't need to use assembly for high performance web app when you can just use Go.

You don't, but it's so much cooler when you do! Not everything needs to be a beige utilitarian module optimized for business consumption.

I didn't need to implement an Intel RDRAND streamer in C and assembler, but it was a ton of fun: https://github.com/ehbar/rdrand-stream

OP, I really liked this project. Kudos for publishing it!

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

#42

Post by imtomt »

rogeliodh wrote: post #20

Awesome. Any resource recommendations to learn ARM assembly?

Honestly, just reading existing assembly to get a feel for how it works, and then violently googling everything that goes wrong. The ARM Architecture Reference Manual (aka "The ARM ARM") ended up being really helpful for looking up what specific instructions do and how they're called. Another really helpful tool is writing something in C/C++, and compiling with "gcc -O1 -S file.c" to see the assembly gcc generated. It helps to mess around a lot with smaller programs in gdb or lldb.

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

#45

Post by imtomt »

ericbarrett wrote: post #41
faangguyindia wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to use assembly for high performance web app when you can just use Go.

You don't, but it's so much cooler when you do! Not everything needs to be a beige utilitarian module optimized for business consumption. I didn't need to implement an Intel RDRAND streamer in C and assembler, but it was a ton of fun: https://github.com/ehbar/rdrand-stream OP, I really liked this project. Kudos for publishing it!

Woah, that's really cool! I'm glad you did that even if you didn't need to. I honestly think everyone needs to write more assembly, because it's so much cooler.

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

#47

Post by t-3 »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #36

This is a great resource, thank you! 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.

Arm is very nice to write assembly for. Having a proper load/store register-centric architecture rather than a stack-centric like x86 makes the mental load of writing code go waaay down, so the attractiveness of HLLs for ease of writing code is greatly diminished on RISC.
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