Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET , HEAD , PUT , OPTIONS , DELETE , byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.

why? why not? the dream of the 80s is alive in ymawky. everybody has nginx. having apache makes you a square. so why not strip every single convenience layer that computer science has given us since 1957? i wanted to understand how a web server actually works, something i know little about coming from a low-level/systems background. the risks that come up, the problems that need to be solved, the things you don’t think about when you’re writing python or c.

this (probably) won’t replace nginx, but it is doing something in the most difficult way possible.

ymawky serving a directory listing

constraints

i gave myself some constraints for this project:

aarch64 assembly only

macos/darwin, not linux. only because that’s the system i have right now. sorry linuxheads :(

raw syscalls only: no libc wrappers

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