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Show HN: Compile C to Not Gates

82 points by tomhee 6 hours ago | 34 comments

Hi! I've been working on the flipjump project, a programming language with 1 opcode: flip (invert) a bit, then jump (unconditionally). So a bit-flip followed by more bit-flips. It's effectively a bunch of NOT gates. This language, as poor as it sounds, is RICH.

Today I completed my compiler from C to FlipJump. It takes C files, and compiles them into flipjump. I finished testing it all today, and it works! My key interest in this project is to stretch what we know of computing and to prove that anything can be done even with minimal power.

I appreciate you reading my announcement, and be happy to answer questions.

More links:

- The flipjump language: https://github.com/tomhea/flip-jump https://esolangs.org/wiki/FlipJump

- c2fj python package https://pypi.org/project/c2fj/

bangaladore 6 hours ago

Reminds me of movfuscator [1]. This can compile programs to movs and only movs.

[1] https://github.com/Battelle/movfuscator

LPisGood 4 hours ago

Battelle is great. They also created some software called Cantor Dust [1] that turns files into images to allow humans to easily spot obfuscated data or files.

The sad thing about this kind of work, because I love it, is that to get paid to do it you need clearances and polygraphs and periodic reinvestigations/continuous monitoring and all sorts of things that I find unpleasant.

[1] https://github.com/Battelle/cantordust

mmastrac 3 hours ago

I'm not sure what you mean but I was a security researcher for a large company for a bit and required none of that. I was required to work airgapped at home, however.

LPisGood 3 hours ago

Really? You were doing offensive security work not for a government (/contractor)? What sorts companies, aside from some enterprise pen testers, employ these roles?

mmastrac 3 hours ago

Email is in my profile -- happy to clarify/share some very rough details if you'd like.

beng-nl 2 hours ago

Agreed that is a fine piece of work. But the author is Chris Domas. Which is plain from the repo readme, but it’d be clearer to link to his repo.

bangaladore 17 minutes ago

I was originally going to link their repo [1]. But I saw it was forked from the one I linked so I just gave that one instead.

[1] https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator

tromp 5 hours ago

Am I right in deducing that this language gets its power from self-modifying code? I.e. flipping bits within addresses of the opcodes of the running program?

tomhee 5 hours ago

You are indeed right

tromp 5 hours ago

I would have expected the language documentation to focus more on this observation and to explain for instance how self modification is used to implement while loops. But I don't even see the term mentioned anywhere?!

tomhee 5 hours ago

Good point! It's mentioned in the github wiki here: https://github.com/tomhea/flip-jump/wiki/Learn-FlipJump#memo...

It was once in the Readme but as I kept developing it more it become longer and longer, so I moved it into the wiki, and especially to here: https://esolangs.org/wiki/FlipJump

tonetegeatinst 2 hours ago

Looking forward to the poor security researcher who gets to reverse engineer some malware sample they compiles this into for obfuscation... Its going to be an interesting blog post.

tomhee 6 hours ago

There is also a brainfuck to flipjump compiler: https://github.com/tomhea/bf2fj

david-gpu 4 hours ago

Ah, the convenience of brainfuck with the performance of flipjump. Excellent.