brainfuck-php

An optimizing Brainfuck parser & interpreter written in PHP.

Brainfuck is an extremly minimal, esoteric programming language consisting of only eight simple commands, a data pointer and an instruction pointer. Read more about Brainfuck here: Brainfuck - Wikipedia
This project is essentially a parser & interpreter for this programming language. The term "optimizing" means that I use special optimization techniques to improve the performance of the Brainfuck program execution.

This is a rework of a very old project of mine, which was actually the first project I ever uploaded to GitHub!
If you want to see the old version, check out the old-version tag.
But be warned of the bad and slow code :D

Requirements

• PHP 8.2 or newer

How to try

Download the repository and then run composer to set up the autoloader:

$ composer install

Afterwards, run any of the examples using ./bin/bf:

$ ./bin/bf ./examples/<example>.bf

For example, lost-kingdom.bf is pretty fun:

$ ./bin/bf ./examples/lost-kingdom.bf

Make sure to check out all the other example programs I have uploaded!

Benchmarks

As far as I can see, this is one of, if not THE fastest PHP Brainfuck parser & interpreter around:

$ php -v
PHP 8.2.14 (cli) (built: Dec 21 2023 20:19:23) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.2.14, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.2.14, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

$ time ./bin/bf ./examples/hanoi.bf
real    0m15,946s
user    0m15,881s
sys     0m0,056s

$ time php -dopcache.enable_cli=1 -dopcache.jit_buffer_size=100M -dopcache.jit=1255 ./bin/bf ./examples/hanoi.bf
real    0m9,347s
user    0m9,296s
sys     0m0,040s

As you can see, the hanoi.bf Brainfuck program only takes 9 seconds to run on my machine, which is pretty damn fast compared to where this project started at (7 whole minutes) and compared to other PHP Brainfuck parsers & interpreters I could find on the internet!