GoKawiilDeveloper builds a working ray tracer using only Brainfuck
A programmer wrote a functioning ray tracer entirely in Brainfuck, the minimalist esoteric language with just eight operations and a single tape of byte cells. The project, named rayfuck, was inspired by a CMake documentation aside noting that ray tracers have been implemented in CMake's own scripting language, prompting the author to attempt an even more extreme example in BF. The source code has been published on GitHub under mTvare6/rayfuck.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The project is largely a demonstration of Turing-completeness and programming virtuosity rather than a practical rendering tool, showing that even languages lacking multiplication, addition instructions, or multiple registers can implement complex algorithms like ray tracing. It also serves as a rebuttal to the idea that simple languages necessarily produce simple codebases, since BF programs of any complexity tend to become large and unwieldy. Such esoteric-language experiments often circulate among programmers as intellectual exercises that stress-test the limits of computation theory.
- A functioning ray tracer was implemented purely in Brainfuck, an esoteric language with only 8 operations.
- The project was inspired by a CMake documentation reference to ray tracers written in CMake's scripting language.
- The code is publicly available on GitHub as mTvare6/rayfuck.
Source: epestr.com, 2026-09-25
Published there as: “I wrote a ray tracer in Brainfuck”
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