Comment by stevekemp

6 hours ago

I've spent the past few weeks coming up with my own simple programming language, which compiles to linux/amd64 assembly.

I could have gone all out writing standard library routines for opening files, running shell commands, coding strstr, strcpy, and similar. And to be honest I did implement some things I didn't need as part of the learning process (for example print(getenv("HOME")) works). But I soon realized I needed some example programs to test things and show off.

So of course the first real program I implemented was a brainfuck interpreter. Which means my language is now, indirectly, turing complete!

My early versions took 9 minutes to output the famous mandelbrot program, so I had to make a bunch of optimizations, and later implemented support for switch/case statements to speed things up. Now I can generate the same output in two minutes - so room for improvement, but also a good bit of progress!

Cheating by implementing another language in my own was very very satisfying. Though of course this is all for fun/learning and not intended to be used seriously by anybody, not even myself!