Building a Brainfuck compiler with Flame

Introduction

This tutorial aims to be a gentle introduction to using Flame. Flame is a set of reusable libraries that can be leveraged to build a compiler. It's especially good at generating code for managed languages like C#, but it's also perfectly capable of compiling, say, Brainfuck. Which is exactly what we're going to do in this tutorial: we're going to build an AOT compiler for Brainfuck, and we'll produce executables that can be run by implementations of the .NET common language runtime (CLR), e.g., Mono or the .NET framework. I'm assuming that you're familiar with C# development, and a C# IDE of your choice. You should also know how to use command-line programs, because that's what we'll be building in this tutorial.

If you don't know what Brainfuck is, then I recommend that you take a look at its Wikipedia page. The important bit is that it's an extremely minimal programming language, so it'll be super easy to implement.

This tutorial will contain a fair amount of code. You can copy-paste and assemble snippets of code yourself, or you can read the tutorial and get the complete source code from the src/ directory in the GitHub repo. The folders in src/ represent the complete source code for this tutorial at different stages.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to start a discussion on GitBook or open an issue – or maybe even a pull request! – on GitHub. I'd welcome your feedback and/or contributions.

Anyway, let's get started.