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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

#11

Post by imtomt »

trollbridge wrote: post #5

Gave me a warm feeling to know that someone would actually still bother to do this by hand. I'm not the only one!

Thank you! I've been obsessed with this idea for a while, finally decided to start on it, then obsessed over it for a couple weeks. I'd love to see some of your projects if you have anything similar, I'm glad I'm not the only one too! I think most programmers would benefit a lot from taking a few weeks or months to try and learn some assembly, and demystify how CPUs and compiled languages work.

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

#12

Post by [deleted] »

imtomt wrote: post #6
thatxliner wrote: post #3

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 decisions—about the architecture of the code. Really cool project though!

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 in the first place. Hopefully those will be of some use. But separate in-depth documentation is definitely a good idea, I'll work on adding that. In the meantime I'm always down to answer any questions about it!

[deleted]

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

#13

Post by imtomt »

thatxliner wrote: post #8
imtomt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in the first place. Hopefully those will be of some use. But separate in-depth documentation is definitely a good idea, I'll work on adding that. In the meantime I'm always down to answer any questions about it!

My first question would be where should I start reading? It seems like you modularized it into multiple assembly files (how does that even work?)

Honestly, read the main file, ymawky.S first. Then I'd read through get.S maybe, checking parse.S on an as-needed basis for parsing-related functions. delete.S or options.S are pretty short, too, so give those a read too.

Modularizing it into multiple files was easier than I expected it to be, you basically have other functions/labels in other files, and mark them as .global at the top. The Makefile compiles each file into their own .o, which you then link all together. You can "b" or "bl" to any label from any other file, as long as it's global and linked together. Same with data in .bss or .data, mark them as .global and they can be accessed from elsewhere.

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

#14

Post by imtomt »

dang wrote: post #9
imtomt wrote: post #2

This post seems to now link to the writeup rather than the repository, sorry! The repo can be found at the top of that page, or directly here: https://github.com/imtomt/ymawky

Whoops that was my fault. Fixed now. (I emailed you, btw, that we'd changed your title, but I forgot to switch the URL back to the repo. Both links are cool.) I'm sure I'm not the only one who has fantasized about doing something like this as a self-soothing enterprise. Kudos to you for actually doing it!

Hey, thank you! Means a lot. It's an odd sort of meditation, but is surprisingly the most almost-therapeutic project I've worked on. Something about the constraints of Assembly that really pull you into the minutiae and clears your head, maybe.

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

#16

Post by imtomt »

_the_inflator wrote: post #10

I feel the guy’s suspicion towards any high level language. I exclusively programmed in assembly on C64, Amiga and the recognized that this ain’t sustainable on PC because there are more and more edge cases or different machine configurations. 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…

Thank you! The thing about eventually building your own meta language ends up happening all the time with bigger assembly projects. I do have a fair few quality-of-life macros too, but probably fewer than I should. I did end up needing to implement by hand what would be standard functions, things like atoi, itoa, strlen, memcpy, streqn.

Higher level languages are more convenient for 99% of things, but the directness of Assembly gives me a rush unlike any other. I didn't live through the C64/Amiga, but I was obsessed with old C64/ZX emulators growing up.

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

#19

Post by shepherdjerred »

OutOfHere wrote: post #18

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?

The first paragraph of the README says this was hand written so I’m not sure why you’re bringing up LLMs
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