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Comment by senfiaj | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, for servers IO (FS/DB, network, etc) is usually a greater bottleneck. Microoptimizations make sense only for CPU bound problems.

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I am pained to think of TLS/HTTPS implemented as a hobby project in ASM, but would be impressed to see it.

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/

that url leads to scam

If you keep scrolling down there is some kind of contest, I was confused at first as well. It seems to be parodying scam sites.

You could borrow the output of the perl scripts from openssl.

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/crypto/aes/as...

https://2ton.com.au/rwasa/

I'd really like to see a TCP/IP stack written in native forth (if anyone needs a really good therapist, that sounds like a _great_ project to try ;)

I mean, it doesn't look _that_ daunting, but the fact that noone seems to ever have release an open source version (there are rumours of proprietary stacks though) speaks for itself.

One of these days ...

This is a web server, but not a full TCP/IP implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19146767

Yes, well aware of it, that's actually very nice for building higher levels of the webserver.

I'd really like to have a complete forth machine dealing with everything, say on an esp32. I guess there's FreeRTOS, so I could use that network layer, but bare metal would be so much cooler. I admit I don't even understand how it would work - would I have to bit-bang the ethernet lines?

You interface with SoC's peripherals rather than bit-bang lines. You can think of them as a kind of memory mapped APIs.

I never interface with the peripheral in an ESP32 directly. I guess I really need to read the Free-RTOS code. Micropython just uses that, last I checked.

I was thinking more of the memory usage. As another project posted on HN described, they were running the web server in the RAM of an RPi ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064312 ). Without a full-fledged OS, and a tiny (and fast) webserver coded in Assembly, more RAM would be available for the webserver and they could serve more users.

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