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# Brainfuck

Brainfuck is one of the most famous esoteric programming languages (i.e. entertaining, not for practical use), characterized by being very difficult to write programs in. Brainfuck is Turing Complete, meaning it has the highest possible computing power and can compute anything that any other programming language can.

The language was created in 1993 by Urban Müller, who wanted to come up with a language for which it would be possible to write an extremely small compiler.

Brainfuck works with raw memory of at least 30000 bytes and internally keeps a pointer to the currently processed byte. Initially all memory bytes are set to 0 and the phe could write the smallest possible compilerointer is set to point to the first byte. The brainfuck program is then composed of following instructions:

• >: Move the pointer to the next byte.
• <: Move the pointer to the previous byte.
• +: Increment the byte at pointer.
• -: Decrement the byte at pointer.
• .: Output the byte at pointer.
• ,: Read an input byte and store it to the byte at pointer.
• [: If the byte at pointer is 0, then move after the matching ] instruction, otherwise move to the next instruction.
• ]: If the byte at pointed is not 0, then move back to the matching [, otherwise move to the next instruction.
• All other characters are ignored and can be used for comments.

The following is an example of a brainfuck program that reads two numbers, substracts them and prints the result:

,>,      read two numbers to cell 0 and 1
[-<->]   keep decrementing both numbers in a loop
<.       print the result

There are extensions and modifications of Branfuck, to name a few:

• Circlefuck: Modification of brainfuck in which the code is stored in memory and can modify itself (implementing von Neumann architecture).
• brainfuck++: Adds file and networking support to brainfuck.
• Brainfork: Multithreaded extension of brainfuck, adds Y instruction that forks the current thread.
• omnifuck: Adds function call-like functionality to brainfuck in the form of multiple separate brains.

# Credits and Notes

• See also: BrainFuck Interpreter.
• See also: Brainfuck via the Esolang wiki.
• Some text was made by Drummyfish, of the LRS Wiki, via Git, CC0.

This page was last edited on 2026-09-25 02:04:49.

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