flâneur

Weekend projects: getting silly with C - lcamtuf’s thing

lcamtuf.substack.com · 915 words · saved by 1 readers

C is beautiful yet full of horrors. Here's to uncovering its hidden depths.

For all its warts, the C language is a marvelous thing. It is remarkably simple, yet somehow expressive enough to allow entire operating systems to be written with ease. Just as curiously, its terse, minimalistic syntax became the way to structure code — copied by nearly all of its mainstream successors, from Java to Go. Among geeks, the syntax can also be credited for the emergence of code obfuscation as an art form. The IOCCC contest is perhaps the best-known outlet for this craft; a typical IOCCC submission looks like this: #define q [v+a] #define c b[1] #define O 1 q #define o 0 q…

saved by

related reading