Winners of the 2025 International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC 29)
44 points by jmillikin
44 points by jmillikin
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.
i liked the cable pseudo-code, and also found more meat on the "napkin-sheet" (can imagine that subleq io-scheme as a direct target for keymap behaviors c:) -- but that sits next to qwen3.c, after which (tbh) https://eternal-software.org/ reads like equally-generated copy :/ i imagine it's quite possible to use ai to fuzz for a conformant toolchain over these ideas that go back at-least to permacomputing framing of xxiivv & uxn roms, or the full 20-60 year history of subleq architectures. reproducible-builds is also an independent pillar of the vision. i'm not taking the time to eg. check commits rn, but wonder whether this is this anything more than existing repro-builds agentically ported to established perma-computing/subleq vm ideas, or if eg. the indirect addressing is a novel development? gut reaction, but: frankly more exited to continue following more established and transparent preservation efforts rn
On quine pong:
Nevertheless, please resist the urge to write “Quine Doom” as a next year’s IOCCC submission.
Can't tell if this is nerd bait or not, but I guarantee someone will take it.
Is it a point of pride to try to make the site unreadable? There's no max line-lengths so on a wide monitor entire paragraphs are a single line