Twenty Seventh International Obfuscated C Code Contest

Standard IOCCC stuff

View the index.html web page for the given winning entry for information on how on how to compile it and how to run the winning program. Look at the winning source and try to figure how it does what it does! You may then wish to look at the Author’s remarks for even more details.

Some C compilers are not quite as good as they should be. If yours is lacking, you may need to compile using clang or gcc instead of your local compiler.

The primary website can be found at www.ioccc.org.

Remarks on some of the winning entries

This year’s Best of Show - abuse of libc - 2020/carlini is such a novel way of obfuscation that it would be worth of a special mention in the (future) Best of IOCCC list!

For some reason, this year’s set of winning entries contains three nostalgic games, Asteroids - 2020/tsoj, Minesweeper - 2020/endoh1, and Snake - 2020/ferguson1.

An entry, kurdyukov1, pays homage to the previous entry 2015/hou.

…We’ll stop spouting too many details now. Have fun exploring all the entries!

Remarks on some of submissions that did not win

As a rule, we try to compile the entries on a variety of platforms. Quite a few entries this year could not be built or executed on some of them due to reliance on library internals or the system runtime.

A few entries were violating the “2053 significant bytes” rule. If an entry could not be brought to compliance within a few seconds of looking at the source, it was disqualified.

One entry tried to get around the size limit by putting the code into Makefile variables and using -D. This is already called out as discouraged technique in the guidelines, but it is worth a reminder.

Several promising entries attempted to make use of the syscall function using literal syscall numbers. This is utterly non-portable.

A note to the authors: when submitting multiple entries, don’t let us easily correlate them by coding style or documentation content, and definitely don’t submit nearly identical versions of your program separately. As we try to judge the entries anonymously, the similarities will cause such entries to compete against one another, making each less likely to win.

We hope the authors of non-winning entries will refine their entries and perhaps re-submit them for the next IOCCC.

Final Comments

One more thing that feels dated is digraphs and trigraphs.

IMPORTANT NOTE: See contact.html for up to date contact details as well as details on how to provide fixes to any of the entries. See also the IOCCC FAQ for additional information on the IOCCC.

Download all winning entries from 2020

• 2020/burton - Best one liner
• 2020/carlini - Best of Show - abuse of libc
• 2020/endoh1 - Most explosive
• 2020/endoh2 - Best perspective
• 2020/endoh3 - Most head-turning
• 2020/ferguson1 - Don’t tread on me award
• 2020/ferguson2 - Most enigmatic
• 2020/giles - Most phony
• 2020/kurdyukov1 - Best utility
• 2020/kurdyukov2 - Least detailed
• 2020/kurdyukov3 - Bset slaml prragom
• 2020/kurdyukov4 - Best abuse of lámatyávë
• 2020/otterness - Most percussive
• 2020/tsoj - Most misleading indentation
• 2020/yang - Best abuse of CPP

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