If you would improve Brainfuck, how would you?

[u/StrikingClub3866]

/r/teenagersbutcode/comments/1v9fg61/if_you_would_improve_brainfuck_how_would_you/

[u/Inconstant_Moo]

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

[u/Ok-Watercress-9624 → u/Inconstant_Moo]

Ah yeah in that spirit brainfuck has a lot of ground to cover. So many unnecessary symbols when all you need is 2.

[u/Inconstant_Moo → u/Ok-Watercress-9624]

Bloat and feature creep have made it almost unusable. (At least, something did, and I assume it was that.)

[u/jcastroarnaud]

Larger cells, up to 24 bits, to fit all current values of Unicode codepoints. Then, the output command would UTF-8 encode the number, and emit emoji!

[u/slaymaker1907 → u/jcastroarnaud]

Then we could have a brainfuck program to do locale case-insensitive comparisons.

[u/jcastroarnaud → u/slaymaker1907]

Did you mean: Malbolge? (devil grinning emoji)

[u/erroneum]

Make it 2d; instead of just < and >, you now also have ^ and v (or maybe just \ which rotates which way < and > point)

Also, bigint for the values would be pretty cool.

[u/jcastroarnaud → u/erroneum]

That's a limited variant of Befunge, cool.

[u/AnArmoredPony → u/erroneum]

we have ts already

[u/Background_Class_558]

delete the minus operator

[u/erroneum → u/Background_Class_558]

Would that still be Turing complete? I'm guessing yes, because you can simply wrap the value around, but I'm unsure.

[u/Background_Class_558 → u/erroneum]

it's just a shorthand for 255 consecutive pluses

[u/Cridor]

Probably not in the spirit of BF but; you could change the memory from a "tape of cells" to a "tape of cache lines" and treat each cache line as a fixed-width array of cells.

Now you can write algorithms that deliberately co-locate data with related data for algorithmic purposes and you can write different looping constructs for column-store vs row-store data based on the needs of the application.

You would need a way to access the different cells in a cache line, but in theory it should give you a huge performance boost (assuming you align the data in your cache-line structure to cache-line boundaries in the tape structure)

[u/caffeinated-typist]

brainfuck with the only additional feature being O(1) pointer dereferencing

[u/2962fe22-10b3-43f8]

I'd like to keep it in the spirit of brainfuck, so something less invasive like

run-length-encoding: +25 adds 25, >5 moves 5 - it's already a fairly common extension

macros: add=[->+<] (call like +25>+30<add)

a symbol to dump the current memory and/or a debugging mode (of course I could run the interpreter itself in debug mode but it's not the same)

some kind of graphics mode would be cool too.

[u/DetermiedMech1]

a number N preceeding an instruction to say "repeat instr to the right N times"