braindead-cc / bcc

an optimizing compiler, debugger ("visualizer"), and interpreter for brainfsck.

The Braindead Compiler Collection

The Braindead Compiler Collection is an optimizing compiler, debugger ("visualizer"), and interpreter for brainfsck, an extremely simple, safe, and fast language for developing maintainable software.

Features

Simplicity

complexity is the bane of all software, simplicity is the most important quality.

-- cat-v.org

The language itself consists of just a few commands, which can be learned by going through the documentation in less than a minute. This results in simple, readable₁, and maintainable code.

Despite being simple, Brainfsck was designed to give power to the developer. Anything you can do in any other language, you can theoretically do in Brainfsck.

Safety

• no NULL.
• no variables.
  • no global variables.
• bounds checking.

Performance

• as fast as C (the compiler/interpreter is written in C).
• compiles to native binaries with no dependencies. ₂

Compliant

BCC adds absolutely no project-specific extensions to the original Brainfsck (with the exception of the '#' command).

Fast compilation

• compiling samples/lostkng.b with the C backend takes less than a second with bcc c -O1 samples/lostkng.b > lostkng.c.

Small, portable, and easy to build compiler

• portable: this toolchain is written in C, and as we all know, no platform is complete unless it has a fully-functional C compiler.
• fast to build: The entire toolchain builds in less than a second. ₃
• small: the toolchain is about 2,000 lines of code total (including the CMakeLists.txt and test script). The resulting binary is only ~23k in size.

Flexibility

• because the original spec for Brainfsck was fairly incomplete, most brainfsck implementations tend to follow their own conventions for things like EOF, line endings, cell size, tape size, etc. BCC's solution is to provide all options, through runtime configuration.

Installation

See docs/INSTALL.md.

Usage

See bcc(1) and brainfuck(7).

Status

This tool is in alpha stage. A lot remains to be done (see docs/ROADMAP.md), but the interpreter and compiler (with the C and Rust backends) are in a working state. The debugger is still mostly unimplemented.

This project is expected to be in a beta-quality state by the time of the 1.0.0 release.

FAQ

1. Q: why
   • A: yes
2. Q: no
   • A: what?

---

1: whether your Brainfsck code is readable depends on what font you're using. (I would recommend either ttyp0 or cozette.)

2: except the libc. If you want to remove that dependency as well, you can compile the generated C code with -static.

3: compiled with gcc with flags to optimize for space (-Os -s) on x86_64.