Making A Brainfuck Interpreter
Check out my interpreter on Codeberg
The original minified interpreter by Urban Mueller
For a while now, I've been digging into C to get a better handle of low-level languages, as well as various esolangs like FRACTRAN. When I found brainfuck, a Turing-complete language consisting of only 8 characters, I knew I had to do *something* with it.
I've always heard that one of brainfuck's interesting uses for a programmer is that implementing a brainfuck interpreter in a new language is a really good way to learn how that language works. This case was no exception, as my initial run was to build it all from scratch in C, and I really did learn quite a bit. Beyond this, this stoked my desire to look into building compilers, interpreters, and language design in general.
While this version was effective and worked, I also learned quite a bit and realized how much simpler I could have made my interpreter by looking at the original one by Urban Mueller (the language's creator). This is a great example of super minified code, and I really enjoyed untying this knot and learning all the subtle intricacies of order of operations with prefix/postfix, comma operators, OR's in place of if statements, etc.
The original interpreter by Urban Mueller (the language's creator)