Brain Debugger / Visualizer

[sunjay]

From @sunjay on January 23, 2017 6:40

An important part of every great language is its tooling. We need a debugger so we can figure out what is going wrong in our brainfuck programs.

1. Brainfuck Interpreter Better Implementation + Debug Mode

• [x] Implement an infinite tape in the brainfuck interpreter using VecDeque
• [x] Implement a debug mode (-D/--debug) which given a program, runs that program, then outputs to stderr a CSV of info like instruction number, instruction as a char, pointer address (index in the tape), memory dump (dump of the entire tape so far)
• [ ] Additional arguments setup IPC so debugging commands can be sent for (pausing, resuming, stepping, setting delay, and setting breakpoints)
  • When these are passed, the interpreter does not start until it is asked to

This will give people the ability to hand debug their brain programs without the interface if they so desire.

2. Brainfuck Visualizer

An electron UI that uses the debugger in a subprocess to output this information.

• [ ] Breakpoints
• [ ] View brain statements and corresponding brainfuck instructions
• [ ] Highlight statements and instructions as they run
• [ ] Display output and errors

3. Sourcemaps (optional)

• [ ] In order to display brain programs side by side to their brainfuck instructions, we are going to need source maps (http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/introduction-source-maps)

Copied from original issue: brain-lang/brain#17

[sunjay]

A basic version of this has now been implemented in the brainfuck-visualizer directory. It works quite well and displays some basic information. With it, I was able to debug the issues that were occurring with #2. More features will be added to it over time.

[sunjay]

This was recently moved from brain-lang/brain to brain-lang/brain-debug