{
  "id": 6051542,
  "title": "Building a Brainfuck DSL in Forth using code generation",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/06/building-a-brainfuck-dsl-in-forth-using-code-generation",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-06T11:39:20.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Lobsters",
    "slug": "lobsters",
    "url": "https://venko.blog/articles/forth-brainfuck"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "This article explains how to support Brainfuck as an embedded language within the Forth programming language using metaprogramming techniques. The author found the process to be enjoyable and shares their comprehensive explanation, assuming minimal prior knowledge from the reader.\n\nBrainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in the early 1990s by Urban Müller to demonstrate the creation of a small compiler. Despite its simplicity, with only eight instructions, it is Turing-complete, making writing a Brainfuck interpreter a popular project among programming enthusiasts.\n\nBrainfuck uses a virtual machine with the following four components: a data pointer, an array of memory cells, a code string buffer, and functions for reading and executing instructions. Although the article is not about writing a Brainfuck interpreter, it focuses on creating a Brainfuck Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that can be embedded directly into a Forth program.\n\nForth is a stack-oriented, concatenative programming language developed by Charles \"Chuck\" Moore in the 1960s. Its two main goals are simplicity through highly factored code and direct communication with the machine. Forth is often bootstrapped directly from assembly without an operating system, functioning as a supercharged macro language over native machine code.\n\nForth has two essential stacks – one for data and another for control flow – and a dictionary for definitions. Values are pushed onto the data stack, and they are consumed by words in the dictionary. Words are Forth's term for subroutines. The dictionary is typically represented as a linked list, with new word definitions appended as the program runs.\n\nWhen a word is typed and entered, the dictionary is searched from newest to oldest, and the corresponding code is executed. Unlike traditional programming languages, Forth words operate on values on the stack and can be split into multiple separate words. This concatenative feature allows programmers to build their \"lot of small definitions,\" making Forths highly adaptable for modifying machine and language internals, which makes them suitable for resource-constrained environments with strict performance requirements.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}