sateko brainfuck

sateko is a toy brainfuck compiler.

NOTE: this requires LLVM 12 installed on your machine.

Compiling

sateko compiles a bf script (e.g. hello.bf) into LLVM IR. The typical process of building an executable depends on your development environment. Building a typical bf program might look something like this:

$ sateko hello.bf
$ llc out.ll
$ gcc out.s
$ ./a.out

About Brainfuck

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language that models a Turing machine. While the language itself is very simple, being productive with it is often less so.

Conceptually, the runtime environment (in this case sateko) provides a tape consisting of byte-sized cells and a set of operations which manipulate that tape.

Operations

• '[' Start a loop
• ']' End a loop
• '>' Increase the tape position
• '<' Decrease the tape position
• '+' Increase the value at the tape position
• '-' Decrease the value at the tape position
• ',' Read a byte from standard in and store value on tape at current position
• '.' Write value at current tape position to standard output.

Loops

Each time a loop starts, the interpreter will check the value on tape at the current position. If that value is 0, the loop will terminate, otherwise, all operations contained between [ and ] will be executed.

Rationale

This is a toy project. I wanted to play with Rust and do a bit of parsing. The brainfuck language is extremely simple to parse, and the number of concerns in the execution envronment is very small.

And, there's a lot of room for experimentation.

Some ideas:

• replace tokenizing and parsing with a parser-combinator
• write a proper parser that will handle more than single character commands
• JIT brainfuck
• REPL
• compile to assembly or bytecode // DONE
• optimization pass
• build all the way to executable
• language extension:
  • add "functions"
  • multi-file programs

License

sateko uses the 3-clause BSD license. See LICENSE file.