Coder Runs Doom Using Regular Expressions at 180 Seconds Per Frame
Developer Artem Lytkin has successfully ported the classic 1992 game Doom to run using only regular expressions (regex), a text-matching utility language. The project uses a 96 MB plain-text string containing virtual CPU registers, RAM, video framebuffer, game data, and I/O components. The regex engine performs text substitutions to simulate processor operations, achieving approximately 80,000 substitutions per second. Each frame requires nearly 14 million substitutions, resulting in a frame time of about 180 seconds. Despite the extreme slowness, the output is reportedly byte-identical to the original game. Lytkin implemented memory access via a binary tree structure to avoid scanning the entire 96 MB string. The project is available on GitHub, and the developer describes playing it as 'closer to correspondence chess with a shotgun than to a twitch shooter.'
Editorial responsibility
- No named human review is recorded for this page.
- Reports are grouped by semantic similarity and deterministic rules. Language models may assist titles, summaries, translation and cross-source analysis; the page itself is projected from evidence records.
- Current automated evidence projection