Probably the most thrilling challenges accessible to any software program developer is that of writing brilliantly working code that’s so obtuse, so indecipherable, and opaque, that even its personal writer would wrestle to know its internal workings after returning to it a yr later. Whereas for some that is simply how they naturally write code, for others it’s a part of the Worldwide Obfuscated C Coding Problem (IOCCC), with 2025’s entrants once again showing their mettle.
The IOCCC judges entries amongst a spread of classes, as it may be exhausting to in any other case quantify what’s the ‘finest’ entry, with ground rules limiting what the entry can entail. Typically so long as your code adheres to the C11 commonplace with a supply measurement of 4,993 bytes or much less and last binary measurement of beneath 2,503, is accompanied by a GNU-style Makefile and doesn’t flip a choose’s laptop right into a raging inferno — it ought to qualify.
Among the many successful entries we acquired enjoyable ones like ‘Most likely to shock’ by [Yusuke Endoh] which generates a Lichtenberg determine in ASCII within the terminal. There are additionally fairly sensible ones, such because the ‘Finest actual emulator’ winner by [Nick Craig-Wood], whose entry is a practical Recreation Boy emulator. Though not full-featured, it could possibly play a spread of actual GB ROMs, simply don’t count on to get any sounds or fancy terminal-based graphics.