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posted by martyb on Monday May 07 2018, @01:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-see-what-I-did-there? dept.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) has now posted the winning entries from its 25th event. The summary of winning entries does NOT contain brief explanations of each winning entry, so you can try to spot the tricks yourself. If you don't mind seeing a brief summary of each entry, there is an alternate page with spoilers linked to from the main page.

The goals of the IOCCC are to write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program within the contest's rules, while showing the importance of programming style, in an ironic way. It stresses the C compilers with unusual code and illustrates some of the subtleties of the C language. Lastly it provides a safe forum for poor C code.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:01AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:01AM (#676944) Homepage
    Complaining that most code is already ugly is missing the point. Most code is as buggy as fuck. These programs all work exactly to admittedly perverse designs.
    I've always liked one-liners, and burton1 is no exception - the expression mentioned in the hint was a real wtf-er. Endoh's a regular worthy winner, but I'm no fan of state-machine/interpreters/compressed data hidden in line-noise strings, and it seems both of his entries rely on that. endoh2, however, is hilarious, so also gets a big thumbs up. Hou is a wonderful piece of twisted-brain WTF, no idea what the preprocessor makes of it, as I don't have gcc's manpages to hand at the moment, and am lazy.

    Several of the entries were a bit sub-par. Relying on "I'm smart, and have derived a hard-to-understand algorithm" does not a great IOCCC entry make. I remember being able to remove about 50 non-whitespace bytes from a previous bellard entry, and this one looks similarly barely obfuscated, merely mangled. Ferguson, likewise, did little for me. I'm sure there was something just like poikala in the past, maybe even from another Finn. Yang even used his own source code as input to his program, a technique I find even cheaper than the compression/state-machine strings, despite it being a clever bundle of ideas.

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