Every programmer at some point gets in touch with the Brainfuck programming language and how surprising is that very few instructions are needed to have a Turing complete language, 6 is the case of Brainfuck (plus other 2 for I/O operations). The language operates on a tape of memory cells using only increment, decrement, pointer movement, and conditional loop instructions. Writing a GCC frontend for it turns out to be a manageable project, and the result is a good template for understanding how language frontends hook into the GCC middle-end and optimization passes.