brainfuck2wasm
A Brainfuck to WebAssembly compiler written in Go.
Usage
In order to start developing for the web with Brainfuck, you will need:
- The
wat2wasmtool from the WebAssembly Binary Toolkit which on Windows is just extracting a release to C:\Program Files\wabt\ and adding the bin directory to your PATH. - A Go compiler
- A modern web browser
Clone this repo, open a terminal, and then cd to the repo directory.
To compile a sample:
go run . -out hello-world.wat ./samples/hello-world.b
You can also build the compiler to a native executable:
go build .
brainfuck2wasm -out mandelbrot.wat ./samples/mandelbrot.b
After compiling a Brainfuck sample to .wat, you're going to need to compile the .wat (WebAssembly text) to a .wasm (WebAssembly) which is actually interpreted in web browsers.
wat2wasm -o brainfuck.wasm mandelbrot.wat
This generates a binary file called brainfuck.wasm which you cannot read but the browser can. It is also called "brainfuck.wasm" for a reason -- the javascript code is written to find the file named "brainfuck.wasm" in the same folder as itself.
To run this example, you cannot simply open index.html in a browser unfortunately. But it's easy to start a webserver if you have Python installed:
python -m http.server
Now open your browser and enter the address localhost:8000 which will get you to your directory being served from your Python webserver.
Immediately, the brainfuck program will be running in the background. Mandelbrot takes a while because a) it is not a simple brainfuck program, and b) I didn't say this was an optimizing compiler.
Takes about 5 seconds for me. Then it will just print almost instantaneously.
Anyone is free to fork this project and make it optimized! There's a lot of opportunity for usability improvements and decreasing the number of generated instructions.
This project was for a pay-wall Medium story that I am still writing.