Cody Boone Ferguson
1ac055fa85
In most cases the word was changed to 'obfuscation' as it was about
obfuscation, not deobfuscation. In some cases like 1995/leo since the
file was (in 1995/leo) about a secret switch it was changed to
'secret.md' (and 'secret.html') but there were others like that as well.
One entry had the words 'spoiling the size rule' but this had been
changed to 'deobfuscating the size rule' which was obviously wrong.
In the latter YYYY/README.md files the judges had written after some
entries (brief summaries) '...
...We'll stop spouting spoilers now. Have fun exploring all the
entries!
but that was changed to:
...We'll stop spouting deobfuscation information now. Have fun
exploring all the entries!
which wasn't really about deobfuscation but just a brief summary of what
the entries did.
And in the most problematic case (at least for me :-), 2018/ferguson) I
had put a joke in:
... but it's the only Easter egg I won't spoil
but it was changed to 'won't deobfuscate' which not only is not what it
is but it spoilt the joke.
In some cases the word was changed back to 'SPOILER' (or similar) but in
most cases not. I believe it should be better now. There are some
caveats, however, as below.
Although make find_missing_links is okay I do not remember if this will
catch links that refer to '%%REPO_URL%%' or other pandoc tokens. This
means I might have to go back to some earlier years to verify links are
okay. That should not take that much time I hope.
It might also be that some wording can still be improved some but it is
hoped this will be discovered when checking links and looking over the
manifest (which obviously changed).
Twenty Sixth 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 winning entries are impressive!
The Most in need of debugging - 2019/endoh is very inventive in a way it produces its own text!
The Most alphabetic- 2019/ciura has an amazing vocabulary!
There are again nods to entries of the years:
These nods to not run afoul of the guideline:
We tend to dislike programs that: ... are rather similar to previous entries
because the entry 2019/dogon appropriately pays homage to past entries without blatantly reusing their code.
...We'll stop spouting spoilers now. Have fun exploring all the entries!
Remarks on some of submissions that did not win
Some entries tried to get around the size limit by submitting a data file that was really C code and then blindly including code in prog.c.
Quite a few entries suffered from undefined behavior like accessing uninitialized locals and/or reading-writing below the stack. We advise running your entry through valgrind to make sure those mistakes are avoided.
Using extra arguments to main, or arguments of wrong types as a quick and dirty
way of declaring variables is now passé. Clang, for example, rejects them outright.
We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit them for the next IOCCC.
Some entries seemed to have a good idea, but the implementation of the idea was limited in scope.
Final Comments
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.