3 comments

  • peterpanhead 8 minutes ago
    Fun project.
  • thisislife2 1 hour ago
    This is an interesting project - kudos for executing it. I have to admit that when I was starting out in this field, I too fantasised about, "Would this software be faster, smaller and better in assembly?". Ofcourse, assembly programming made some sense in embedded electronics, which can be very resource constrained and even specialised for one particular application. Thinking from that aspect, perhaps you should consider making this a specialised program that runs on something like a Raspberry Pi - running such a web server directly on it, without an OS (or a very minimal OS), would make for a real cool and interesting project.
    • senfiaj 1 hour ago
      IMHO, for servers IO (FS/DB, network, etc) is usually a greater bottleneck. Microoptimizations make sense only for CPU bound problems.
      • jvanderbot 57 minutes ago
        I am pained to think of TLS/HTTPS implemented as a hobby project in ASM, but would be impressed to see it.
        • LegionMammal978 52 minutes ago
          I did actually make an attempt at that once for BGGP5 [0]. (That is, making a minimal, horribly insecure 'client' implementing just enough behavior to get a response from a server.) But I got demoralized by how much space the binary blobs for the crypto algorithms took up, in comparison to the actual machine code.

          [0] https://binary.golf/5/

        • grebc 38 minutes ago
    • hatefulheart 51 minutes ago
      What on earth are you talking about? Assembly makes sense in desktop computing as well. Have you ever, for example, watched a video? What do you think powers the codecs, JSX?
      • xnorswap 28 minutes ago
        I'd assume most are written in C or some other higher level language. Certainly I checked the x264 ( VLC implementation of h264 ) and that is C.
        • otherjason 17 minutes ago
          The statistics reported by GitLab for the x264 repo (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/x264) report that the project is 13.5% assembly; common utilities used in the inner loops of the codec have optimized assembly implementations for several CPU architectures.
          • xnorswap 12 minutes ago
            I stand corrected.
  • pixelesque 1 hour ago
    Previous comments from two days ago:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587