BetterFuck is a Brainfuck language compiler into managed code (CLR). Compiled programs are ordinary CLR assemblies and therefore can be executed under MS .NET or Mono runtimes.

To use compiler, first save your Brainfuck code to plain text file (encoding does not matter, but it is recommended to use UTF-8 with or without BOM for any purposes). File extension does not matter either, but it is common practice to use .b extension for Brainfuck sources. If you're new to Brainfuck, see below for additional information about Brainfuck language.

Then you can run BFuck.Console frontend to compile your source. Consider this:

> ls
BFuck.Compiler.dll
BFuck.Console.exe
BFuck.Runtime.dll
source.b

Here BFuck.Compiler.dll, BFuck.Console.exe and BFuck.Runtime.dll are necessary BetterFuck libraries and source.b is user-written Brainfuck source file. For this example, we'll use simple source:

> cat source.b
,+.,+.,+.

This program reads three characters from input stream and prints next character for each character read.

Compile our program:

> BFuck.Console source.b
source.b... ok.

(In non-Windows environments you may experience problems when running CLR executables from terminal; use mono BFuck.Console.exe source.b command then.)

Now we got additional file in our directory: source.exe. Let's test it:

> source.exe
abcdef

(Here I've entered letters ace with my keyboard, and program inserted one additional character after every my keypress.)

(Same comments about running Mono-related stuff in non-Windows environments applies here.)

Note that your compiled assembly (source.exe in our case) references BFuck.Runtime.dll assembly so it has to be in the same directory for your program to function properly.

BetterFuck runtime machine is a simple collection of memory cells. Every cell is of CLR type System.Int16 and therefore can store values from 0 to 65535. Every value can be interpreted as ordinary character and be printed to Unicode-aware output stream.

Count of cells can be changed when configuring BetterFuck engine; current default is 256 cells.

In Brainfuck, there are only 8 single-character commands:

1. + for incrementing current cell value.

2. - for decrementing current cell value.

3. > for moving one cell right (forward).

4. < for moving one cell left (back).

5. . for writing current cell value to output stream.

6. , for reading single character from input stream to current cell.

7. [ for starting loop.

8. ] for jumping to previous [ if current cell value is not equal to 0; proceeds to next command otherwise.

Source code can include any other characters; they will be dropped before compilation.

BetterFuck compiler also introduces the concept of comments. Any piece of line starting with # character will be treated as comment till end of line.