IOCCC 2024: A Renaissance of Obfuscated C Artistry After Four Silent Years

After a four-year hiatus dedicated to rebuilding its infrastructure, the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) has roared back for its 40th anniversary, announcing a record 23 winning entries that redefine the boundaries of creative C programming. Dubbed IOCCC28, the 2025 contest saw submissions surge in both quantity and quality—a testament to the global programming community's pent-up ingenuity. Judges attribute this renaissance to the "Great Fork Merge": a monumental effort involving 6,168+ commits to revamp the IOCCC website, develop the mkiocccentry toolkit, and deploy a new submission server. These innovations slashed winner-announcement delays from months to a mere two hours, with source code published live during a YouTube event.

The Engine Behind the Revival

The contest's hiatus wasn't idle time. Judges overhauled systems to:
- Honor legacy: Preserve four decades of global contributions.
- Reduce administrative overhead: Automate submissions via new tools.
- Accelerate transparency: Winners were selected by July 7, 2025, and revealed on August 2—a 33-day judging sprint deemed impossible under the old framework.

"Large code size isn’t everything," noted judges, highlighting that 10 winners used less than half the expanded size limit. "Only three entries neared the 21% increased cap—originality and elegance trump brute force."

Standout Entries: Where Obfuscation Meets Genius

This year's winners blend technical prowess with whimsical complexity:

  • 2024/cable1: A 135-byte "world's smallest LLM inference engine" running LLaMA 2's 7B-parameter model. The ChatIOCCC tool, initialized via get_model.sh, offers quirky interactions—ask it why this entry won.

  • 2024/carlini: An Intel 4004 microprocessor emulator simulating 1971-era gate-level logic. Painstakingly slow yet historically poignant, it mirrors computing's dawn.

  • 2024/endoh1: A C preprocessor marathon generating images pixel-by-pixel. Rendering a 512x512 image requires 262,144 preprocessor invocations and ~24 hours—rewards include "record size" recognition for the patient.

// Sample intrigue: 2024/stedolan's 135-byte one-liner
// Feed it hex digits or the MD5 hash of its own code

Other marvels include a UTF-8 editor (2024/howe), a virtual machine with a Commodore 64 emulator (2024/kurdyukov3), and a prize-winning ℤ₃ maze (2024/mills). Each entry turns C into a playground of cryptography, emulation, and visual trickery.

Lessons and the Road to IOCCC29

Judges issued candid advice for future entrants:
- Avoid derivative work: Submissions echoing past winners face steep hurdles.
- Embrace modern C: K&R-style defaults fail today’s compilers; explicit typing is non-negotiable.
- Prioritize originality: Shrinking open-source projects isn't enough—innovate or iterate.

With IOCCC29 slated for December 2025, judges will refine rules and tools post-“vacation,” urging past participants to resubmit enhanced entries. As one winner's code whispers: Seeing (and hearing) is believing—especially when unraveling obfuscation that celebrates C's enduring magic.

Source: IOCCC 2024 Winners (CC BY-SA 4.0 by Landon Curt Noll).