Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
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/
Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning launched on May 10, 2026 with 430 votes, #30 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Ymawky is a static file web server for macOS written entirely in ARM64 assembly. It handles GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, and OPTIONS requests, with support for byte-range headers enabling video streaming scrubbing. The server decodes percent-encoded URLs, enforces document root restrictions, serves custom error pages, provides directory listing, and includes defenses against slowloris-style attacks. It is designed for developers interested in low-level systems programming and assembly language implementation.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
MacOS Web Server written entirely in ARM64 assembly - imtomt/ymawky
This is ymawky (yuh maw kee), a web server written entirely in ARM64 assembly. ymawky is a syscall-only, no libc, fork-per-connection web server written by hand for MacOS and Linux (see the Linux branch ). Requires Xcode Command Line Tools. Install with xcode-select --install . ymawky only runs on apple silicon (arm64). Ensure there is a www/ directory next to the ymawky executable. That's the document root where ymawky searches for files. GET with an empty filename ( GET / ) will search for www/index.html , so you might want to make sure there's an index.html as well. ymawky will try to serve static error pages when a client's request results in error, eg 404. The pages it searches for in…from github.com
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A pure ARM64 Assembly web server, now on Linux with CGI for no reasonJun 2026 · github.com · ▲51This 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=48080587 In 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…
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