Look at the README.md file for the given winner for information on how to compile the entry 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.

The IOCCC has a web site and now has a number of international mirrors. The primary site can be found at https://www.ioccc.org/.

Use make(1) to compile entries. It is possible that on non-Unix / non-Linux systems the Makefile needs to be changed. See the Makefile for details.

Read over the Makefile for compile/build issues. Your system may require certain changes (add or remove a library, add or remove a #define).

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

Remarks on some of the entries

We believe you will be impressed with this year's winners. The Best of Show is a fine example of obfuscation. But don't ignore the other winners! There are games, utilities, programs that output images and a one-liner that is incredibly compact for what it can do.

The Best Abuse of the Guidelines is technically allowed by the rules. This year we allowed it due to the functionality of the program. This entry is one of the easiest to read! Don't assume you can win using similar techniques next time ... :-)

This year a single person won two awards! We also had repeat winners with their 6th, 4th and 2nd winning entries this year! (Please note that judging is done completely anonymously. Be warned that we may disqualify entries that reveal the identity of the submitter.)

Remarks on some losing entries

There were some outstanding entries that did not win. Unfortunately some very good entries lost because they:

depended too much on non-portable side effects in expressions; and/or
depended too much on a particular byte order; and/or
required the use of a special script, data file or pseudo-machine language that was not supplied with the entry.

We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit them for the next IOCCC.

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 addition information on the IOCCC.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2001,2004,2023, Landon Curt Noll, Peter Seebach and Leonid A. Broukhis. All Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. If you do use this work in some form, the IOCCC judges would appreciate (but does not require) if you were to send us a note about your use.