Brainfrick-rs

An optimizing brainfuck interpreter written in Rust.

Learn More

Check out my blog for an in-depth look at how brainfrick-rs works:

https://rafibayer.github.io/2022/11/02/brainfrick.html

Optimizations

• Contraction
  • Fuse repeated >/< and +/- instructions
• No-Op
  • Skip No-Op instructions at compile-time
• Clear
  • Replace [-] with an internal Clear instruction
• Copy Loop
  • Replace certain copy/multiply operations with optimized instructions

Impact

samples/mandelbrot.bf runtimes

Unoptimized:

$ time cargo run --release -- samples/mandelbrot.bf
...
real    0m18.641s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.015s

Fully Optimized:

$ time cargo run --release -- samples/mandelbrot.bf
...
real    0m5.276s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.015s

Architecture

sequenceDiagram
    participant src as Source File (.bf)
    participant main as Main
    participant compiler as Compiler
    participant vm as Virtual Machine
    participant io as IO
    src->>main:Open brainfuck source file
    main->>compiler:Brainfuck src as &str
    compiler->>compiler: Parse source to instructions
    loop Optimizations
        compiler->>compiler: Apply optimization
    end
    compiler->>compiler: pre-match loop braces
    compiler->>main: Produce Compiled Program
    main->>vm: Create and run VM for Program
    vm->>io: Utilize configured IO