A pure ARM64 Assembly web server, now on Linux with CGI for no reason
Details
- External ID
- 48640278
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A pure ARM64 Assembly web server, now on Linux with CGI for no reason
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- June 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 51
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8497267759562842
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
This is ymawky, a now-dynamic web server written entirely in ARM64 Assembly. I've previously posted about ymawky here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587In the past month and a half, I've made some pretty major improvements: I've added CGI scripting support, so the server now supports query strings and dynamic content; and I've fully ported ymawky to run on Linux, rather than macOS-only.In addition to GET/PUT/HEAD/DELETE/OPTIONS requests, because of CGI support ymawky also accepts POST requests (only to CGI resources for now).I've also updated the more detailed writeup to reflect CGI support and the Linux port: https://imtomt.github.io/ymawky/
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- arm64 assembly web server
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Handcrafting an entire dynamic web server with CGI support in pure ARM64 Assembly requires deep systems programming and CPU instruction-level expertise that AI cannot reliably vibe-code.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires hand-written ARM64 assembly using raw Linux syscalls (socket, bind, listen, accept, fork, execve, dup2, pipe) to handle TCP network I/O, parse HTTP requests byte-by-byte, and execute CGI scripts with piped stdin/stdout. The hard parts include manual memory management without standard C runtime (glibc) support, register allocation, signal handling, process lifecycle management, and debugging low-level ABI calling conventions. This requires deep systems-level software engineering and ARM architecture expertise.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: nginx, apache, Hiawatha
Concerns raised: Security vulnerabilities likely present in ~4500 SLOC assembly project, Fork-on-request model much slower than async event loop at scale, Not suitable for production use, Networking syscalls are major bottleneck, not code language
Feature requests: Macros for code organization, Register renaming refactoring
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 34 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 35 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 236 days after the earliest competitor.
- Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning · hn · 2026-05-10 · 430 upvotes · similarity 0.71
- Serene Bach · hn · 2026-05-17 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Deadwire-HTTPD A triple-threaded x86-64 assembly static server · hn · 2026-07-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Cj–tiny no-deps JIT in C for x86-64 and ARM64 · hn · 2025-11-05 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Ducktape · hn · 2025-12-16 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- jeyzma · github · 2026-09-27 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Roblox-Mac-Linux-Port · github · 2026-09-24 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Codex CLI compiled to WASM running in the browser · hn · 2026-08-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.