The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC for short) is an annual online contest in making the most creatively obfuscated programs in C. It's kind of a "just for fun" thing but similarly to esoteric languages there's an element of art and clever hacking that carries a high value. While the productivity freaks will undeniably argue this is nothing more than a waste of time, the true programmer appreciates the depth of knowledge and creative thinking required to develop a beautifully obfuscated program. The contest has been around since 1984 and was started by Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.
Unfortunately some shit is surrounding IOCCC too, for example confusing licensing -- having a CC-BY-SA license in website footer and explicitly prohibiting commercial use in the text, WTF? Also the team started to use Microshit's GitHub. They also allow latest capitalist C standards, but hey, this is a contest focused on ugly C, so perhaps that makes sense after all.
Hacking the rules of the contest is also encouraged and there is an extra award for "worst abuse of the rules".
To list a few common ideas employed in the programs let's mentioned these:
/dev/tty or recursively including itselfAnd let us also mention a few winning entries:
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