An agentic LLM should be pretty good at Arm64 assembly generation, but maintainability of large code could become an issue. Why would it not run on Linux?
As for why it wouldn't run on Linux, there are some pretty big differences in the actual assembly. One pretty superficial difference is calling conventions -- MacOS uses the x16 register for syscall numbers, Linux uses x8. Calling the kernel in Mac uses "svc #0x80", in Linux it's "svc #0". That's ~120 lines that need to be replaced, but easy enough to just use sed. Syscall numbers are all different, as are the struct layouts for sigaction(), MacOS has an "sa_tramp" field that Linux doesn't have. Enforcing max processes is done here using the MacOS-specific proc_info() syscall, which can be used to get the number of children any given process has. Linux doesn't have an equivalent, so process tracking would need to be done differently. Finally, Linux has the getdents64() syscall, rather than getdirentries64(), which uses a different struct and is called differently.
I'm sure an LLM could make all those changes, but it's a pretty large codebase, so it would probably make some mistakes or miss things.
I'd be doing the same kind of thing if I had more free time.
I don't know how much you know about assembly code, but people write it professionally to squeeze performance, typically on a server, and servers are lot more likely to run Linux than Mac. The project in question literally is a web server. Who runs a real production-grade web server on a Mac?
Some of it is in pursuit of productization feedback. Some of it isn’t.
The general audience here is (or at least, used to be) tech enthusiasts, and you can usually assume that crowd will enjoy cool shit in tech.
Personally I’ve had to occasionally hand write x86 assembly for work on a handful of occasions to ensure certain runtime guarantees were met that the programming language i was using couldn’t provide directly. I’ve used it a ton in hobby projects because it’s just kinda cool, and i want to have a better understanding of that world.