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The IOCCC Competition Is Back

Posted by samzenpus on from the welcome-back dept.

Rui Lopes writes "After a 5 year hiatus, the IOCCC (International Obfuscated C Code Contest) is back! This marks the 20th edition of the contest. Submissions are open between 12-Nov-2011 11:00 UTC and 12-Jan-2012 12:12 UTC. Don't forget to check this year's rules and guidelines."

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It'd be nice if ... by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But then we never would have a piece of code that calculates its own area. Isn't that worth it? (LINK).

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Underhanded C contest should return by vadim_t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The IOCCC is cool, but the Underhanded C Contest was a lot more valuable.

    The entries for the IOCCC can show a lot of cleverness, but nobody in their right mind would accept such code. The beauty of the Underhanded C ones is that the code looks reasonable, but does extremely undesirable things.

  3. Re:Use Duff's Device by JonySuede · · Score: 5, Interesting

    don't use them anymore, go read that post: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html

    --
    Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
  4. Re:Use Duff's Device by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Jim Gettys has a wonderful explanation of this effect in the X server. It turns out that with branch predictions and the relative speed of CPU vs. memory changing over the past decade, loop unrolling is pretty much pointless. In fact, by eliminating all instances of Duff's Device from the XFree86 4.0 server, the server shrunk in size by _half_ _a_ _megabyte_ (!!!), and was faster to boot, because the elimination of all that excess code meant that the X server wasn't thrashing the cache lines as much.

    Emphasis mine. That's REALLY freaking interesting. Posting this AC before modding you up.

  5. Re:The Internet is based on C by Sduic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Without C code there would literally be no Internet.

    Because obviously only C is Turing-complete.

    Before I stir up any vitriol, I'm just kidding. I think C is under appreciated precisely because is provides only a thin abstraction that (hopefully) maps well to the target architecture, but otherwise stays out of the way. That is to say, when all you have is a hammer, you can easily shoot yourself in the foot.

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    *this space intentionally left blank
    "One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white