Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
Details
- External ID
- 48080587
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- life
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 430
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9870759289176091
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
This is ymawky, a static file web server for MacOS written entirely in ARM64 assembly. It supports GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, and OPTIONS requests, and supports Range: bytes=X-Y headers (which allows scrubbing for video streaming). It decodes percent-encoded URLs, strictly enforces docroot, serves custom error pages for any HTTP error response, supports directory listing, and has (some) mitigations against slowloris-like attacks.I’ve also written a more detailed writeup here: https://imtomt.github.io/ymawky/
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche developer utilities and toolchains
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- web server built in assembly
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a complete HTTP web server from scratch in raw ARM64 assembly requires deep knowledge of low-level CPU architecture, Darwin kernel syscalls, register management, and manual memory handling that AI assistants frequently hallucinate.
What it would actually take: A real version requires implementing socket networking (socket, bind, listen, accept, setsockopt) directly via macOS ARM64 BSD syscalls, manually parsing HTTP/1.1 headers and byte ranges in registers/buffers, and strictly enforcing file path security without standard libraries. The hard parts are handling asynchronous I/O (kqueue) purely in assembly, managing memory boundaries safely, and debugging low-level ABI calling conventions. It requires an experienced systems engineer proficient in ARM64 instruction set architecture and POSIX/XNU kernel internals.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: MartyPC
Concerns raised: Assembly string parsing is extremely difficult and error-prone, Range header handling in assembly is a nightmare, Project only runs on ARM64, not Linux VPS or broad audience, Assembly development is inefficient compared to higher-level languages
Feature requests: Support for Linux/broader platform compatibility
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 18 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 19 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 192 days after the earliest competitor.
- A pure ARM64 Assembly web server, now on Linux with CGI for no reason · hn · 2026-06-23 · 51 upvotes · similarity 0.71
- Deadwire-HTTPD A triple-threaded x86-64 assembly static server · hn · 2026-07-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Socket to Me, a static file server that runs in the browser · hn · 2026-06-22 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Codex CLI compiled to WASM running in the browser · hn · 2026-08-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Backlit Keyboard API for Python · hn · 2026-04-19 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Waputer · hn · 2026-04-17 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- jeyzma · github · 2026-09-27 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Grsh · hn · 2026-01-14 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.