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

> "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly

Not all languages use NULL terminated strings. I think Rust actually stores the string length alongside a pointer to the start of the string data. You can do the same in C, but you'd have to do it manually using a struct. In assembly you could do the same thing since you get to decide basically everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8PLpDgZc0E

Agreed. And super cool project. After seeing Matt Godbolts Advent of Compiler Optimisations in December I decided to do AoC in assembly. Was the most fun I had in years even though I didn't finish all days!

And super educational. Since then I've been pondering which problems require dropping down to the assembly level. E.g. implementing a JIT compiler, a coroutine runtime, etc.

I frequently reference this exact meme to people whenever someone complains about complicated or difficult-to-write code. Now that’s you’ve made this project I suppose we have zero room to complain anymore!

Thank you! I will keep working on it and post something here

Yes, exactly, a 3D software renderer. But the goal is to do (almost) everything from scratch and by hand. No LLMs, no std library, no compilers. Just a few imported math functions (such as sin and cos). Not the same as bare metal programming but close

How well does that run on real hardware (or PCem/86box)?

It's a HTML browser for Pi Pico2, CLI, meant to support my in-house project running on a mesh of Pico2's. I really wanted to use RISC-V and it needed a webhook that serves a page on PIO wake. We are at the browser is written about 60%. The server is now already handled ;P I found this awesome project someone posted on HN. When I complete my project the browser will be released alongside. You can very likely reproduce it with less than a handful of prompts. One thing I really do believe, ideas are going to be the next open-source. LLM's can make ideas into things.

How fun! I'm glad it was interesting, please feel free to link to it :)

Really? It's a bit of a nonsense that I did so long ago so it's weird to hear someone interested in it...

The script has been lost to time. I wrote it 5+ computers ago and I don't even know where input that backup...

The overall gist is that CGI Bin specification sets Environmental variables, STDIN and STDOUT to various values. A minimal pure assembly that writes <h1> Hello World </h1> over stdout is your minimalist CGI Script.

A bit of research into what those STDIN/Environmental variables is needed for more. I knew this may e 20+ years ago but have long forgotten....

With access to the various input parameters offered over CGI, you can easily access form data (buttons and whatever clicked by the user). Use some smart file writing to store sessions and off you go....

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Maybe start with a Perl CGI tutorial. Then go backwards to C, and finally raw assembly by hand

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?)

You could also do a trick some Windows stuff does - parse syscall indices from said dylib.

And even if you avoid external libraries, you still need to interact with the kernel to do I/O, and that involves system calls that are also non-portable.

Hell no. Far too many registers, not enough instructions, and (especially with ARM64) weird restrictions that arose from trying to pack things into 32-bit instructions as efficiently as possible.

I've been writing x86 Asm for a few decades. RISCs are simpler in all the wrong ways. After all, "just use a (stupid) compiler" was the whole philosophy.

Artisanal code has a future. Maybe not a high paid one but maybe we go back to roots. if you enjoy programming and were never focused on output or on pipelines, LLM doesn't offer the same ezperience

I don't see anything dismissive here. It is a realistic assessment: if the choice is between code generated by AI or code generated by a human, and the AI is better in an objective manner, then why should a company employ a human? I refer here solely to the code result; naturally humans may do things AI can not do yet, but if the question is solely about code quality and AIs are better here, then why would that comment be dismissive rather than realistic?

> And the only people who will ever be in that position are the ones who take the time and effort, out of sheer curiosity, to learn how things work.

People learn something new all the time, AI does not learn anything, it just simulates and hallucinates. But the core question is not addressed with that. What would you do if you have to compete against AI, and AI is better? We already see these with the new generation of humanoid robots from China. Those things make Boston Dynamics robots look like tinker-toys in comparison - already as-is. Give it ten more years and we finally reached AI skynet for real.

I don't see it as dismissive, maybe you two are talking past each other but seem to be on similar side. I think the parent just articulated a sense of resignation that many people probably share. I think you might be saying that maybe there is still some shred to hold onto, possibly.

Don’t be naive. Anthropics (et al) mission is to make us unemployable. They need to sell their tools to companies so that they can finally discard 90% of their workforce. It’s a win win for companies and for anthropic (et al). Obviously we are the losers in the middle. And people around here on HN may think they cannot be affected, that they are the elite class of developers… they are gonna get hurt

Specifically how can you use pgx with sqlite while pgx is a postgres-specific library? Sqlc works great with Postgres or Sqlite, Sqlc works with pgx when connecting to Postgres, but pgx can't be used with Sqlite AFAIK

They replied to the title.

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

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.

The result is unimpressive either way -- it's the journey that is exciting for these kinds of projects

You won’t be able to enjoy your free time playing with computers if anthropic et al make you jobless.

The “you” doesn’t necessarily refer to you. Im addressing 90% of the developers out there. We love playing around technology… but I doubt we will be thinking the same once we become unemployable. But here we are, having fun with the tools of companies that want to finish us. How ironic

> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of.....

Nobody actually needs a web server built in assembly language, it serves no practical purpose. And I say that as someone who learned to program 6502 assembly language in 1983 and has sporadically used assembly of various architectures since.

The absurdity of building it would have been the curiosity draw pre-LLMs, but when it existing is just a series of prompts away it really loses all of its meaning.

But yeah... hooray for AI. Can't wait until we learn to harness it to supercharge the most important and valuable thing we do as a human society in modern times: stuff increasingly intrusive ads in front of everyone at all times.

It has always been possible to do it. LLMs are not a particular enabler for that.

The difference is that now it is worthless: there is no learning, no person caring about the result, nothing aspirational for the public to look towards... we used to enjoy those challenges, used to be proud of solving complex problems... now? Yeah, whatever, execute execute commit push, let another LLM "review" and call it a day.

If you've got an idea that you need assembly language for, you can use a compiler to create that assembly language. It'll probably do a better job than an LLM. Assembly projects are interesting because they're written in assembly, not because they contain assembly.

This idea that LLMs are going to enable us to do things that we wouldn't have done before, therefore overall productivity and value is going to increase "exponentially" seems naive to basic economics.

If LLMs are good for doing things we aren't already doing, it indicates the overall addressable "value" that LLMs could provide for such things is actually quite low. If the task has necessary prerequisites that you don't currently possess, but you haven't spent the effort to jump that hurdle yet, then it's a good indication the value of completing that task is very low. Even if, maybe especially if, we're talking about personal projects where the value proposition is personal and not momentary, it indicates the person already feels in their bones that the return on doing this thing is not worth the effort.

I'm struggling with this with my leadership at work. We have developed a thing that is going to remove the need to hire temps [0] for data entry when we get clients who send us large amounts of their "data," aka "a thousand 30-slide PowerPoints each with one line graph of interest sitting in the corner of one slide somewhere." It is an ask that comes up a lot, it's always very expensive in both the time and money axes for the client for that task, but overall it's just a small part of the contact budget. I'm all for using what we've built to cut down the time cost for our clients, but my leadership thinking it's going to lead to massive cost savings for our clients seem to forget just how much time we spend in meetings and planning and documentation and testing and reevaluation and more meetings versus actually executing on things.

It's also bad business. To me, giving results faster should be a premium offering. We should be charging more, not less.

[0] We don't actually hire temps, we turn our junior data analyst into temps by burning them out with tons of unpaid overtime. They then leave and we have to back fill them at rather extreme cost of overhead for hiring compared to the direct contract overtime we didn't provide.

I think for programmers the enjoy is to write it by his own, not to just have a toy. If I just want a web server in asm the easiest is to just decompile an existing one into assembly and call it a day.

Only exciting if you already got a lot of programming under your belt, like Carmack, or a product guy.

> without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.

Isn't that kind of view pathetic and sad, though? Why would anyone pick up and guitar or play a piano if they could just listen to the same song already made by someone else? I struggle to understand this view of people that pretend to not understand why being an expert of some skill is perceived as valuable by some people. This is also belies next problem with this line of thinking which is that it says "we don't need to learn X to do Y because we have AI" but misses the same AI could easily replace the need to have you think to do Y in the first place. I don't know.

> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing

But you're not doing it. The ai is doing it.

If the op can write a web server in assembly language then I'm pretty sure they could have done it in a higher-level language. But they did what they did for the journey and the learning along the way. Vibe coding it omits all that, and misses the point of the exercise.

I do believe this is just a next step in languages. We've come this far trying to make code NLP, now we have the closest thing to a translator in our generation. It's an exciting time, just don't pay attention to talking heads.

the biggest issue with llms is that they make those who have no idea what they are doing seem like they know something.

>> without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.

yeah its nice though this in 100% of cases results of software of even lower quality we had before.

so hard to tell where is the win here. the fact that you can generate some code does not make it a win, just a curious fact.

Which is why now companies can happily reduce head count.

> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way

If you are having an LLM generate the assembly language for you, that is not even remotely close to writing the assembly language yourself.

I don't find it exciting even in the slightest. I can think of nothing more boring and unsatisfying than having an LLM generate all of your code for you.

I mean, I understand why some think this could be exciting from a "I can get something done fast because the LLM generates it for me" standpoint -- because their excitement stems from something getting done at all instead of just sitting in the pool of ideas forever. However, you will never know the code generated by an LLM like you know the code you wrote yourself. Also you will never gain the same satisfaction of finishing a project where the code was written by an LLM that you gain from finishing a project where you wrote the code yourself.

If you are a person that doesn't care about coding or doesn't like to code at all, I could totally see why you'd find this exciting - to you it's all about avoiding work you don't care for or want to do yourself anyway. Also, a high percentage of people who do love coding have zero interest in writing assembly language, so if they were required to write some for a project, I could also see them being happy with having an LLM generate that part of the project for them.

However, I think for people who genuinely love to write code, the situation is the opposite of what you said -- it is far more sad than it is exciting. In fact, for many of them it has already reached the point of depressing for many reasons. I don't think it is primarily because the LLMs have gotten significantly better at generating code (which they have). I think some of the bigger reasons are that so many people who now pay people to produce code have:

1) got a very short-sighted and "rose-colored-glasses" view of what LLM-produced code will do for their company.

    and

2) deeply under-appreciate the value of having a person or team of persons who understand their business, the hardware and software required to support their business, and the work required to both keep things running and handle new requirements as they come along. Because of that under-appreciation, many already have punted ( and/or are preparing to punt) those people to the curb because they think they can just have an LLM do their job and save a ton of money.

In the long run I think most (if not close to all) of those businesses are going to be sorry if they over-indulge in replacing human-produced code with LLM-produced code. I think the ones who lean too heavy on the LLM side are going to eventually collapse into a heap of unmanagable dumpster-fire code that they can't understand nor maintain. A whole new world of incidental complexity will consume every project, and in the long run it will just eat them alive (figuratively speaking, of course :-D ).

The analogy is AI music produced without effort in seconds, not recorded music.

I think the parent's point is: a couple of years ago handwriting was the only option. You'd see a post like this and know it was something special.

With LLMs, we can't tell anymore if something is a labor of love with hundreds of hours of work behind it, or half a dozen prompts to Claude Code.

> Encouraging people to understand the layer of abstractions they're building on is helpful, doesn't matter if they do it by hand or with clankers.

But we know that long term use of LLMs does not lead to better understanding, it leads to reliance on the LLM for the person to be able to function at their job.

I appreciate the effort. But why not put the skills into something that would be genuinely useful to others or solve a pain point? Open source the results or handover to someone who would like to maintain it.

What an odd take. It is often titled "software craftsmanship". Is the craftsman not allowed to practice? Not everything needs an immediate real-world application. Not everything needs to be enterprise-grade, bulletproof, web-scale or whatever. It needs to work for the creator, and sometimes not even that.

In the same way we appreciate Japanese wood joinery, why not not just appreciate this? Someone might even learn a trick or two reading it.

I have a (relatively well informed) view that people who aledge that "if you used an llm you did no thinking or problem solving" have never in fact used an a llm to generate anything particular complex.

You do indeed need to do quite a bit of thinking and problem solving, to build things with an llm.

If you disagree, repeat this project, so you can share with us how little thinking it required.

In this case you could even replace "LLM" with "C compiler" and it would change nothing.

Look, I still got my physical copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book with its genius content about hand-optimizing cycle count on 486 and Pentium processors, beating compilers at that time.

It was an absolute artform, but completely obsolete by today.

The problem, at least for me, is that by now I'm so desensitized that I won't even bother looking at something, because it could potentially be the product of a few prompts. The LLM noise is drowning out the human signal, so to speak. Same for articles, blog posts, etc. It only takes a few em-dashes, a few "it's not this, it's that" to lose faith in the text's authenticity, and with that, any interest in its content.

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Is it not possible to maintain a single codebase for both OS with appropriate .ifdef commands?

You could always start in a virtual environment.

Because it's absurd for most people to write too much Assembly by hand.