Brainiac

A heavy-duty optimizing Brainfuck interpreter written in C.
Copyright © 2023 Chris Roberts (Krobbizoid).

Contents

1. About
2. Usage
3. Building
4. Credits and License

About

Brainiac is a Brainfuck interpreter written in C. It was initially written as a refresher for C and low-ish level concepts, but soon grew into a more sophisticated implementation.

Brainiac aims to implement some optimizations by parsing and optimizing an abstract syntax tree and generating executable bytecode. This approach closely mirrors a typical compiler, but interpreting the source code directly is also feasible for such a simple language.

Usage

Run Brainiac from the command line with a path to a Brainfuck source file to interpret it:

brainiac test/hello.bf

Hello, world!

Run Brainiac from the command line without any arguments to enter REPL mode:

brainiac

Brainiac REPL - Enter Brainfuck code or 'exit' to exit:

bf: (prompt for input)

Any input starting with exit will exit the REPL. Entering Ctrl+D or Ctrl+Z on Windows can also be used to exit.

Pressing Ctrl+C will exit the program in interpreter mode or REPL mode. This is useful if a program enters an infinite loop.

Building

Brainiac is built using GCC and Make:

make

The source files in src/ will produce the binary file bin/brainiac or bin/brainiac.exe on Windows, along with intermediate object files. These object files are not necessary for the binary to run.

Make can be used to build Brainiac in debug mode:

make debug

In debug mode the BRAINIAC_DEBUG macro is defined, which causes a program's AST and bytecode to be printed after successful parsing. The binary is also optimized for use with debugging software.

Make can also be used to remove the bin/ directory:

make clean

This subcommand requires rm from Coreutils.

Credits and License

Hello world program at test/hello.bf by Khalid Sabry:
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/55422/hello-world/163590#163590

Mandelbrot set fractal viewer at test/mandelbrot.bf by Erik Bosman:
https://esoteric.sange.fi/brainfuck/utils/mandelbrot

Brainiac is released under the MIT License:
https://krobbi.github.io/license/2023/mit.txt

See license.txt for a full copy of the license text.