Brainfuck compiler in Go - well not quite. A compiler outputs binaries. It's in between an interpreter and a compiler.

This is not the smallest possible implementation of a Brainfuck interpreter by any means. Nor it is the fastest. Those aren't the goals.

The goal from this was to learn a bit about how interpreters and compilers work. Using Brainfuck looked to be the simplest way to achieve this.

Steps of this process are kept in separate packages and serve as a decent blueprint for future, more complicated work.

Resources:

Lexical Scanning in Go

Ivy, APL Interpreter

1. lexer on *.b file
2. parses tokens from lexer
3. create list(AST in this context) of instructions from (2)
4. optimize instructions
5. evalute instructions
6. output result

Steps 1-3 run concurrently.

Get it.

$ go get github.com/domluna/brainfuck-go

Use it.

$ brainfuck-go helloworld.b
// Hello World!

Running examples/mandelbrot.b timings.

    without optimization -> 194.10 seconds
    with    optimization -> 52.62  seconds

That's ~400% speed up. So it's fair to say the optimizations do a fair amount.