winterqt/barf

Brainfuck ahead-of-time compilation using Rust macros

barf

Brainfuck ahead-of-time compilation using Rust macros.

why?

I was talking with some friends, and decided to time myself writing a Brainfuck interpreter. After I said I was doing this, Mary said:

But have you considered: brainfuck JIT

I had not considered that.

NotNite then implemented a basic implementation of this in JavaScript. But JavaScript is bad, and Rust is good, so I set out to rewrite it in Rust with the power of macros.

usage

[dependencies]
barf = { version = "0.1.0", git = "https://github.com/winterqt/barf.git" }

fn main() {
    brainfuck!("+-");
}

Also see examples/hello-world.rs for the classic hello world example, which expands to this.

implementation details

I originally planned to have the macro take input such as:

brainfuck! {
    +=
};

This was feasible, up until I had to parse the [ and ] tokens. These are delimiters in the Rust language, and I tried many very weird things to try to be able to parse them individually, but eventually gave up.

why not use quote?

I had some issues with parsing "partial" tokens for the [ and ] commands, so I stuck to string concatenation.