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20 Jan 2008

Optimizing, Multi-threading Brainfuck to C Converter

wbf2c converts an esoteric programming language called brainfuck into C code which can be machine compiled. Several optimizations are done to make the resulting program extremely fast an efficient. The converter supports both a static (standard 30,000 cells) array or a dynamically-sized array. It also supports many different cell types, from the standard char to multi-precision cells using GMP.

The converter can also run several brainfuck programs on the same memory array at once by running each one in a thread. To make sure each brainfuck operation is atomic, each cell gets a mutex lock. The only other multi-threading brainfuck implementation I know of is Brainfork.

For an example of some brainfuck code I wrote,

+>+<
[
[->>+>+<<<]>>>
[-<<<+>>>]<<

[->+>+<<]>>
[-<<+>>]<<
]

This program fills the memory with the Fibonacci series. Make sure you use the dynamically sized array, along with the bignum cell type. After two or three seconds of running, my laptop (unmodified Dell Inspiron 1000) can calculate and spit out a 140MB text file containing the first 50,000 numbers in the series. I used the -d dump option to see this output.

Download information, as well as some more examples, including a multi-threaded one, are on the project website.

[] permanent link

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