Are you tired of writing Python and JS at your day job? Looking to learn a lower-level language but dreading leaving the comforts of your REPL? Well, your search is over: BrainF*ck is your language and bfi is your interpreter.

Once you bite the bullet, jump in, and get acclimated, you'll wonder why you ever waited. Without built-in support for variable names, a garbage collector, concurrency, syscalls, literals, objects, inheritance, types, syntax, floating point, keywords, data structures, best practices, or Stack Overflow there are almost no ways left for you to shoot yourself in the foot.

Of course, if you're feeling a moment of human weakness, it would be possible to implement any of those things.

The ethos of BrainF*ck is to leave difficult things like critical thinking and analysis to the machines like GPT-2 that are good at them and focus only on stuff you, as a human, are naturally good at: pointer arithmetic, rigid control flow, and data encoding.

You know that feeling of dejection when you go to learn a new language and see that it has an entire book written about it, an estranged sequel whose existence is denied by most, and even some aspirational fanfiction in the works? Don't you just wish everything you needed to know about your new language fit in a single README section? Bear with me here for a little longer.

Imagine you're back on the primordial savannah but instead of a spear in your hand it's a pointer and instead of lush grassland around you it's a single dimensional roll of tape extending forever off into the point horizon. If you have properly engaged your lizard brain this scene should come naturally.

You have 8 standard language commands to memorize:

Plus two more bfi extension commands:

Every other character is a comment. Feel free to annotate your code with as many emoji as you think are reasonable for an adult to put into a text file and use whatever limp or virile indentation strategy floats your boat.

Now that you have the language down pat we can jog our legs with a gumball program:

,[.[-],]

Recognize it? It's our friend, cat. It reads from stdin and spits it out to stdout until a NUL terminator is received. My productivity skyrocketed after aliasing 😸 to it in my shell. Not having to worry about a cat implementation I don't understand freed up a ton of headspace better spent visualizing tape. Who really needs options like --help from their command line utilities?

Example usage:

$ <README.md bfi ',[.[-],]'

Yes, GNU cat supports interior NUL bytes and this program does not. Those invalid unicode sequences in that binary you accidentally catted would only have messed up your terminal's encoding anyway.

To clear up some of the ambiguity around the behavior of this BrainF*ck implmentation:

• The roll of tape is infinite in both directions. You are free to travel along it as you wish and fresh cells will be allocated ahead of you until your OS decides otherwise.
• Cells hold a single byte (i.e. value on [0, 255]), are initialized to zero, and wrap on over or underflow.
• If input is requested (,) when none is available the interpreter will move on without action.

Compile bfi as you would any other Rust project not provided prepacked through standard channels:

$ cargo build --release

From there, figure it out:

$ ./bfi --help

Luckily for you Rust programmers, bfi has a library interface! See examples/toy.rs for a starting point.

BrainF*ck is an excellent language to implement the workload of your networked application in. See examples/{server,client}.rs for a simple number cruncher microservice and example client communicating using ZeroMQ.

Some hope remains for those of us forced to use a tired language like Python in our professionial environments. Check your despair at the gate — you can work with libbfi the same way you'd incorporate any foreign object into your project. See examples/python/bindings.py for a Python integration using ctypes.

Further, examples/python/trick_your_boss.py contains a minimal framework for surreptitiously programming in BrainF*ck at work under your manager's nose. Don't worry about the resulting proliferation of binary blobs in your repo, odds are s/he doesn't even review your code. On the off chance you get a question about all of the "corrupt GIFs" appearing, make something up about the pixel depth or proprietary codecs or just let GPT-2 make your excuse up for you.

Serious face: the secondary purpose of this project is the interpreter; its primary purpose is as a playground to learn Rust. It's my first stab at the language and its ecosystem and it's probably not the highest quality or most idiomatic codebase out there. Take what you see here with a grain of salt.