Please don't beat me up, I can't help the title. 🤬 The creator of this quite esoteric little language - Urban Müller - is to blame here. Yes, the Swiss are just known for their (straaaaaange) humor ... Brainfuck is a language, that most CS students stumble upon in year one. First they smile, then they don’t. BF is not easy to learn, let alone write, or debug. The language, that has quite a little more of history, comes with just 8 symbols - so I guess, no huge manual here 😬.

The goal of the creator was to write one of the smallest possible compilers for a Turing complete language. Achieved. Congrats! Currently, however, Dr. Brian Robert Callahan proudly holds the winner's cup, his implementation of a working BF compiler is just 231 bytes in size!

What a feat. And for full transparency, the title is somehow double-fu$%§0. Brian actually managed to bring the size down to 210 Bytes after the release of his article. No matter, whether you know BF already or not, Brian's article is a wonderful lesson and a resource to marvel at absolutely worth your time. Enjoy the HN find of the week.