Teaching myself about the low-level stuff going on with a programming language. Compilers, interpreters, JITs for a programming language. Have sailed the high seas for far too long that the land is a distant memory.
Teaching myself using the code at [https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/bf_interpreter_jit_compile]
Brainfuck is an interesting, if hard to read, language. It only has eight operations it can perform > < + - . , [ ], yet is Turing complete. There’s nothing really to lex; each character is a token, and if the token is not one of the eight operators, it’s ignored.
| Instruction | Description |
|---|
| increment the data pointer (to point to the next cell to the right). < | decrement the data pointer (to point to the next cell to the left).
- | increment (increase by one) the byte at the data pointer.
- | decrement (decrease by one) the byte at the data pointer. . | output the byte at the data pointer. , | accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the data pointer. [ | if the byte at the data pointer is zero, then instead of moving the instruction pointer forward to the next command, jump it forward to the command after the matching ] command. ] | if the byte at the data pointer is nonzero, then instead of moving the instruction pointer forward to the next command, jump it back to the command after the matching [ command.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
./interpreter ../code/hello_world.bf