Coder Runs Doom Using Regular Expressions at 180 Seconds Per Frame
Developer Artem Lytkin has successfully ported the classic 1992 video game Doom to run using only regular expressions (regex), a text-matching utility language. Lytkin created a 96 MB plain-text string containing virtual CPU registers, RAM, video framebuffer, game data, and I/O components. The regex engine performs approximately 80,000 text substitutions per second, requiring nearly 14 million substitutions to render a single frame, 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 using a binary tree structure within regex character-jump instructions to avoid scanning the entire 96 MB string. The project is available on GitHub, and the developer describes playing the game as 'closer to correspondence chess with a shotgun than to a twitch shooter.'
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