/brainless-bot

A Discord bot written using Brainf**k.

Primary LanguageBrainfuckMIT LicenseMIT

Table of Contents:

What?

Yes, you read that correctly, I wrote a Discord bot using Brainfuck.

What is Brainfuck?

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language, meaning it's not for practical use, like for making software or anything, it's designed as a challenge to make your brain hurt.

Basically, you have an array of integers that are all 0 by default, and you have a pointer that starts at 0, which is the very start of the array.

You also have the following characters:

  • > | Move the pointer forward by 1.
  • < | Move the pointer backwards by 1.
  • . | Print the ASCII value currently pointed at.
  • , | Receive user input and store the given integer at the index pointed at.
  • + | Increment integer pointed at by 1.
  • - | Decrement integer pointed at by 1.
  • [ | Start a loop.
  • ] | Close a loop.

NOTE: Any other character will be ignored, so you can add comments really easy, but your comments cannot contain ANY of the above symbols.

Using these characters, you can move through the array and modify numbers. As mentioned above, . prints the number your pointing at in ASCII. Here's an ASCII table so you can see what this really does:

ASCIItable

So if we do the following:

Use index 1 as the for loop counter which is set to 8
In the loop we move to index 0 and increment it 9 times
then we move forward and decrement by 1
This is basically `for (int i = 8; i != 0; i MinusMinus) { j PlusEquals 9 }`
When the loop concludes we move back to index 0 and print the value
>++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<.

We'll get the number 72, which according to the table, is H.

How do you write a Discord bot in Brainfuck?

Trick question; you don't. You can't do anything with Brainfuck except math and print out ASCII characters. But if we use my Brainfuck interpreter, we can use 3 flags to write code for another language but in Brainfuck:

  • --out=path/to/out.file | Writes the output to the specified file.
  • --dump=bin/file.dump | Dumps the memory (in this case, the array of integers) to the specified file.
  • --no_stdout | When using ., the value will not be printed to the console.

The output mentioned above, is comprised of every character printed using ., and although we use --no_stdout, the output still exists, it just isn't printed to the screen.

So, we can write TypeScript code that makes a Discord bot, but using Brainfuck. The output is the TS code, and the target file is a .ts file.

Directories explained:

  • /bf The actual Brainfuck code I'm writing.
  • /templates Command and event templates (saves a TON of time, so fight me).
  • /ts The TypeScript code that my Brainfuck code translates to.

If you run this project, you'll see a new folder appear called dumps. In here is a dump of the data array from each Brainfuck file. They'll look something like this:

Brainfuck code to dump from:
>++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<. H (72)
>>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+. e (101)
>>++++++++++[<+++++++++++>-]<--.. ll (108)
>>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+. o (111)
>>+++[<+++++++++++>-]<. ! (33)

👇 Dump of the above Brainfuck code:

72, 101, 108, 101, 33, 0

Literally just a series of numbers. Pretty simple but helpful for debugging why you're printing the wrong character, because you can see what number you're actually making instead of the one you're targeting.

Ok, but why?

My friend made a joke about writing a Discord bot in Brainfuck, which obviously isn't possible using just Brainfuck. So when I made my own Brainfuck interpreter for fun, I thought back to that joke and decided to make it a reality. Stupid story but I assure you that's what happened.