README.md

bff - A complete Befunge 98 interpreter in Rust

What?

bff (which stands for Befunge Forever) is a toy project, the secondary purpose of which is to interpret Befunge 98 progams.

Its primary purpose is learning Rust.

Befunge?

Befunge 93 is an awesome esoteric stack-based programming language, where the program is not a sequence but a grid of instructions, like the following program that reads an integer from stdin and prints its factorial:

&>:1-:v v *_$.@
 ^    _$>\:^

The program counter / instruction pointer starts from the top left corner and moves around the grid, executing instructions and changing directions, until it meets the @ instruction, terminating the execution of the program.

You can read more about Befunge 93 here.

Befunge 98 is a Turing-complete extension of Befunge 93. Tt expands the program grid infinitely (Befunge 93 limits it to 80x25), adds file I/O operations, support for libraries (which it calls "fingerprints"), and much much more.

You can read more about Befunge 98 here.

State?

bff is under heavy development (in the dev branch).

Currently, it is a Befunge 98 interpreter that completely conforms to the official language specs and successfully passes the Mycology testsuite.

Right now, bff does not implement anything that is not considered part of the core of the language (e.g., fingerprints, concurrency etc). It is planned to introduce additional features in subsequent versions of bff.

Any comments/remarks/criticism in the form of issues are welcome.

Any contributions in the form of pull requests are welcome, if they are properly documented and accompanied by tests.

Why?

Because I believe that writing a quirky interpreter is one of the best ways to learn a systems, memory safe, type strict programming language like Rust.

Can I play with it, too?

To use bff, you have 2 options:

1. Download/clone this repository and build it (use the --recurse-submodules flag if you want to clone and test against the Mycology testsuite):

$ cd bff
$ cargo build --release

The bff executable will now be under the ./target/release/ directory.

2. Install it with cargo from crates.io:

$ cargo install bff

How?

You can use bff as an executable, if you installed it via cargo:

$ cat hello_world.bf
"!dlrow olleH">:#,_@
$ bff hello_world.bf
Hello world!

Or, if you downloaded/cloned the repo:

$ cargo run -- tests/bf93/hello_world.bf
[...]
Hello world!

A complete list of bff arguments can be found by executing bff -h or cargo run -- -h.

You may also use bff as a REPL. Note that each line is followed by an implicit @ instruction, and that 0 is the exit code that is always returned to the OS:

$ cargo run
[...]
bff - Unefunge 98 REPL
version 1.0.0
(type "exit" or "quit" and press <Enter> or press <Ctrl> + C to quit)
> 2a*.
20 
> exit
$

As a future goal, the REPL will be restricted to the Unefunge 98 instruction set, to avoid unwanted behavior, like the following infinite loop:

$ cargo run
[...]
bff - Unefunge 98 REPL
version 1.0.0
(type "exit" or "quit" and press <Enter> or press <Ctrl> + C to quit)
> ^