Getting started

For starters, fire up your favorite IDE and create a simple command-line project. Call it whatever you want; I called mine flame-brainfuck and set the default namespace to Flame.Brainfuck. Your main C# program file might look a bit like this.

using System;

namespace Flame.Brainfuck
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

Now, let's get Flame set up. This part shouldn't be too hard. All you have to do is install the Flame.Front NuGet package. That'll also pull in the necessary dependencies.

To get a working Flame-based "compiler," all we have to do is replace our "hello world" program by the following.

using System;
using Flame.Front.Cli;

namespace Flame.Brainfuck
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var compiler = new ConsoleCompiler(
                "flame-brainfuck", "my Flame-based Brainfuck compiler",
                "https://github.com/jonathanvdc/flame-brainfuck/releases");
            compiler.Compile(args);
        }
    }
}

You're welcome to replace "flame-brainfuck" by the name you picked for your project. If you build your project and produce an executable – which is, in my case, called flame-brainfuck.exe – then you can run the line prefixed by a dollar sign ($) below to get the given output.

$ flame-brainfuck.exe
flame-brainfuck: nothing to compile: no input files

You might even get colorized output, which is already plenty exciting in my book.

Note: flame-brainfuck.exe may not be in your current directory; the C# compiler will probably put it in a bin/Debug/ or bin/Release/ folder. That's fine. You don't have to navigate to the directory that contains flame-brainfuck.exe; just replace flame-brainfuck.exe by a path. Alternatively, you can add flame-brainfuck.exe to you PATH variable.

But wait, there's more. We can also print some version information, which looks like this on my machine.

$ flame-brainfuck.exe --version
flame-brainfuck version 1.0.6214 (based on Flame 0.9.1)
Platform: Unix 4.4.0.57
Console: xterm-256color
You can check for new releases at https://github.com/jonathanvdc/flame-brainfuck/releases
Thanks for using my Flame-based Brainfuck compiler! Have fun writing code.
flame-brainfuck: nothing to compile: no input files

The takeaway here is that Flame handles most, if not all, I/O. It'll happily parse command-line arguments for you and react to that on its own. You don't have to worry about the command-line interface; that's just not part of your core responsibilities as a compiler enthusiast, so handling typical user interaction is best left to a common library.