nowfound

Life & fun · June 19, 2015

SL

Servasm – Literate web server in x86 assembler

Servasm – Literate web server in x86 assembler launched on June 19, 2015 with 117 votes, #285 of 3,954 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 11 years on.

Visit zarkzork.com ↗Alternativestop 7% of June 2015

In plain words

Servasm is a minimal web server written entirely in x86_64 assembly language for Linux systems. It serves static files using a forking architecture where each request runs in a separate process, leveraging kernel functionality to keep the codebase simple at around 1,000 lines of commented assembly code. The project is presented as a literate program with full source code visible, though it is explicitly not intended for production use.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Minimal x86_64 Linux-only file webserver written in assembly language. This page is literate program with all service source code. Project repository and build instructions . Warning: server is not intented for production use. It may and will wreck you stuff. Servasm is forking server, each request is processed in separate process. This is how it was done in Mesozoic Era (except we use sendfile(2) , which wasn't invented then). And this allows us to make things stupidly simple and take as much leverage from Kernel as possible. We aim for ~1kloc of assembly with comments and spaces. Then main process loops on accept(2) system call. For each request it fork(2) s main process and processes…from zarkzork.com

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • ServBay2024 · servbay.com · ▲399

    Hello HN, I’m one of the creators of ServBay. I built this because I got tired of the cognitive load required just to start coding. On my Mac, it was a fragile mix of Homebrew services and asdf conflicts. On Windows, managing PATH variables and fighting with Docker Desktop's resource usage was equally frustrating. I missed the simplicity of the MAMP/XAMPP era, but I needed to support modern stacks (Go, Rust, Node, etc.). What it is: ServBay is a native local development environment for both macOS and Windows. It is not a wrapper around Docker or VMs. It bundles everything you need into…

  • Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaningMay 2026 · github.com · ▲430

    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/

  • HTTP server written in x64 assembly (x86-64)2014 · github.com · ▲12

    A minimalist HTTP server for Linux, written in x86_64 assembly - jcalvinowens/asmhttpd

  • ZeroHTTPd: A web server to teach Linux performance, with benchmarks2019 · unixism.net · ▲472

    Articles in this series Part I. Iterative ServersPart II. Forking ServersPart III. Pre-forking ServersPart IV. Threaded ServersPart V. Pre-threaded ServersPart VI: poll-based serverPart VII: epoll-…

  • TinyWasm – A tiny WebAssembly Runtime written in Rust2024 · github.com · ▲172

    Show HN: TinyWasm - A tiny WebAssembly Runtime written in Rust Hi HN! I'm excited to share TinyWasm (https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm), a WebAssembly Interpreter I developed for my final university project. The main goal of this project was to deepen my understanding of WebAssembly and interpreter design. TinyWasm successfully passes all the official WebAssembly 1.0 tests and also includes features from future proposals such as like bulk memory operations. Initially more of a research project, TinyWasm focuses on simplicity and portability. It has minimal…

  • Kyushu – A self-hostable WASM sandbox for JavaScript workersJun 2026 · kyushu.dev · ▲89

    A self-hostable Wasm sandbox for JavaScript workers.

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗

Launched alongside, June 2015

the whole month →
  • A​rticles you need to read before launching a startup.

    Growth · 2015 · startuplaunchlist.com

  • Get any site's company logo with just a URL

    Dev tools · 2015 · clearbit.com

  • The best new games, every day

    Life & fun · 2015

  • Coverr▲584

    Beautiful, free videos for your homepage background.

    Work · 2015 · coverr.co

  • SLIDE▲563

    A hoverboard by Lexus (no joke)

    Life & fun · 2015

  • The Best Landing Page Inspiration

    Work · 2015 · lapa.ninja