I wrote a ray tracer in Brainfuck

blanchebiche

Calling this "written in brainfuck" is like calling anything in C "written in machine code"

throwaway99e2

Isn't this just a ray tracer in python/c that spits out brainfuck? By this logic gcc writes all my programs in assembly lol

shoo

brainfuck is unpleasant to write directly - e.g. the language doesn't have variables, so you need to manually do the bookkeeping of which memory offset is storing what 'variable'. & if you need to refactor your program slightly, in a way that changes the memory layout, maybe you need to manually rework the absolute & relative offsets. So I can appreciate why the author didn't roll up their sleeves to directly write BF - that's neither a productive nor interesting exercise. Interesting to see how the author decomposed the problem: - C raytracer https://github.com/mTvare6/rayfuck/blob/master/ray.c ~~ LLM refactor of the C code ~~> - SSA-style C raytracer code https://github.com/mTvare6/rayfuck/blob/master/ray_ssa.c ~~ c2dsl.py helper script (compiler) ~~> - DSL raytracer https://github.com/mTvare6/rayfuck/blob/master/ray.dsl ~~ dsl2bf.py helper script (another compiler) ~~> BF raytracer https://github.com/mTvare6/rayfuck/blob/master/ray.bf (~22 mb of unreadable nonsense) The dsl2bf compiler has a bunch of examples of implementing slightly higher level abstractions atop BF primitives. E.g. "go" to move the pointer to a different offset, destructive & non-destructive copies, all the way up to things like division -- BF only natively offers unary addition/subtraction. If we have a read of the code of the final compiler, dsl2bf.py, the abstractions used in that code are relatively simple: global variables, local variables, lists, dicts, for loops, function definitions & function calls. It is feasible to implement a simple compiler like dsl2bf in BF itself, with sufficient head scratching. Again, quite unpleasant to try it directly in BF, but a next step could be to implement the dsl2bf compiler in the DSL itself - extending it if necessary, then compiling it with itself to produce a dsl2bf compiler implemented in BF.

laughing_man

I'm kind of disappointed nobody writes this kind of stuff in Whitespace.

extraduder_ire

There have been some other attempts to build compilers that output brainfuck. This one supports some LLVM IR instructions: https://github.com/caozhanhao/llvm-brainfuck There's a list of others here, with asm2bf seeming the most complete: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck_code_generation