Winners of the 2025 International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC 29)

40 points by jmillikin 14 hours ago on lobsters | 2 comments

lemon | 13 hours ago

I particularly liked these:

  • nwc1: a stripped down GameBoy emulator, providing the bare minimum to run Tetris (also, apparently the author is the developer of rclone - cool!)

  • cable: a subleq*-based one-instruction-set-computer VM emulator, aided by a whole software stack, including a custom LLVM backend and a port of Linux to the architecture. The pitch of the project is a tiny VM whose description fits in a napkin and once implemented can run pre-compiled "capsules" as a form of software preservation. Flashy website aside, I found the documentation of the machine architecture really interesting: https://github.com/adriancable/eternal/blob/main/docs/machine_architecture.md. Also the notes on the linux port, and the LLVM backend which is based on generating pseudo-instructions, with a convention for pseudo registers, that in a final pass expand to pre generated sequences of subleq instructions.

    * technically, it augments the 'standard' subleq with indirect addressing modes

  • jhshrvdp's roguelike!

  • uellenberg's quine pong, for which the developer created his own programming language that generates self-modifying C programs.

antlers | 10 minutes ago

Comment removed by author

polywolf | 9 hours ago

yusuke endoh has done it again... great contest, always love reading these!