Daring coder gets Doom running with regular expressions at 180 seconds per frame, like playing 'correspondence chess with a shotgun' — nearly 14 million substitutions to render a frame at 80,000 substitutions per second

Doom in regular expressions.

Running the 1992 Doom on the most random piece of hardware around has become probably the most common unofficial programming challenge. We've seen the game running on anything from toasters to an Anker charger, and even a pregnancy test. Enterprising coders also get it running on the weirdest software possible, and just recently Artem Lytkin got it running in regular expressions.

Developers in the audience are probably recoiling in horror, as that sentence is definitely cursed. You see, regular expressions (regexes) are a utility language used in programs for finding and replacing text. They're incredibly powerful, but the syntax is often said to be write-only, as it looks just like gibberish. For example, /.*(\d{4}).*/g would find the "2026" in "Tom's Hardware 2026 articles." They can be exceedingly complicated, as they include conditional statements, elaborate character-jumping, and substitution rules. However, this also means they fulfill all the technical requirements to be a programming language.