IR decoding with BPF

> I don't know about you but that's pretty cool that it was designed and implemented generically enough that it's got uses beyond the direct use for which it was developed.

This would be noteworthy if this were using original BPF, which was explicitly written for stateless filtering of network packets using a very minimal virtual stack machine. The BPF engine in Linux was extended to support more generic constructs as well as loading and storing of state, and has more in common with Google's NaCL project than original BPF. The only remaining limitation in Linux's BPF is, IIUC, the inability to loop--in classic BPF only forward jumps are allowed, whereas in Linux BPF backwards jumps are allowed if the verifier is convinced the program doesn't actually loop.

It's not surprising at all that it can do this.