After a four-year hiatus, 2025 will see the return of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Started [1]in 1984 (and inspired partly by a bug in the classic Bourne shell), it's "the Internet's oldest contest," acording to their [2]official social media account on Mastodon .

The contest enters its " [3]pending" state today at 2024-12-29 23:58 UTC — meaning an opening date for submissions has been officially scheduled (for January 31st) as well as a closing date roughly eight weeks later on April 1st, 2025. That's according to the newly-released (proposed and tentative) [4]rules and [5]guidelines , listing contest goals like "show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way" and "stress C compilers with unusual code." And [6]the contest's home page adds an additional goal: "to have fun with C!"

Excerpts from the official rules:

> Rule 0

> Just as C starts at 0, so the IOCCC starts at rule 0. :-)

>

> Rule 1

> Your submission must be a complete program....

>

> Rule 5

> Your submission MUST not modify the content or filename of any part of your original submission including, but not limited to prog.c, the Makefile (that we create from your how to build instructions), as well as any data files you submit....

>

> Rule 6

> I am not a rule, I am a free(void *human);

> while (!(ioccc(rule(you(are(number(6)))))) {

> ha_ha_ha();

> }

>

Rule 6 is clearly a reference to The Prisoner ... (Some other rules [7]are even sillier ...) And [8]the guidelines include their own jokes:

> You are in a maze of twisty guidelines, all different.

>

> There are at least zero [9]judges who think that [10]Fideism has little or nothing to do with the IOCCC judging process....

>

> We suggest that you avoid trying for the ' smallest self-replicating ' source. The smallest, a zero byte entry, won in [11]1994 .

And this weekend there was also a second announcement:

> After a 4 year effort by a [12]number of people , with over 6168+ commits, the Great Fork Merge has been completed and the [13]Official IOCCC web site has been updated! A significant number of improvements has been made to the [14]IOCCC winning entries . A number of fixes and improvements involve the ability of reasonable modern Unix/Linux systems to be able to [15]compile and even run them.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader — and C programmer — [16]achowe for sharing the news.



[1] http://www.ioccc.org/faq.html#ioccc_start

[2] https://fosstodon.org/@ioccc

[3] http://www.ioccc.org/status.html#pending

[4] http://www.ioccc.org/next/rules.html

[5] http://www.ioccc.org/next/guidelines.html

[6] https://www.ioccc.org/

[7] http://www.ioccc.org/next/rules.html#rule23

[8] http://www.ioccc.org/next/guidelines.html

[9] http://www.ioccc.org/judges.html

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism

[11] http://www.ioccc.org/1994/smr/index.html

[12] http://www.ioccc.org/thanks-for-help.html

[13] http://www.ioccc.org/index.html

[14] http://www.ioccc.org/years.html

[15] http://www.ioccc.org/faq.html#compiling

[16] https://www.slashdot.org/~achowe