Obfuscated C masterpieces: an IOCCC tier list
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BhcQURVjJg
- Original title: The Craziest Coding Contest Ever
Prime ranks winning entries from the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) — tiny, ASCII-art-shaped C programs that do astonishing things. A celebration of how much capability fits in a few hundred bytes of deliberately unreadable code.
The conceit: each program's source is laid out as ASCII art hinting at what it does, and Prime tier-lists them, biased toward visual spectacle. Highlights:
- S+: a 3D spinning-top simulator (loads custom shapes), a terminal Game Boy emulator running Tetris/2048, a self-encoding/ de-obfuscating "vortex", an ASCII tornado simulator, and an L-shaped program that boots a full minimal Linux container you can fork-bomb inside.
- Polyglot: one source file that runs as C, Ruby, AND Perl, behaving as cut/head/tail line tools depending on language and which line you strip — Prime can't comprehend how it's built.
- A Larry Wall tribute: a self-patching Quine chain that becomes a diff tool after patching itself 25 times.
- Others: Doctor Who intro, moon-phase printer, relaxation-sound generator, calculator, bonsai tree, Star Wars crawl, Minesweeper, tic-tac-toe, Zork-style text-adventure engine.
Recurring awe: debugging or even writing such code is beyond him; the density of capability per character is the whole point.