This C code should be ILLEGAL. It’s also fantastic.

/ September 9, 2025

From LaurieWired.

This C code is disgusting. But also really, really clever.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) has been consistently breaking human minds since 1984. This year’s winners are out of control.

But hey, I’m a Professional Reverse Engineer.

Time to find out:

– Can government-grade tools defeat unreadable code?
– Hiding Salmon in Unicode is not very effective
– Why did I just get Rickrolled?

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Timestamps:

00:00 The World’s Worst (Best?) Code Competition
01:33 My Gut Feelings (Ranked)
04:03 Rick Astley’s Obfuscated C
07:05 Virtual Machine of Doom
10:05 Preprocessor Raytracing?
13:07 Teeny Tiny LLM Engine
16:53 Vi would you do this
20:01 Unicode Salmon Recipes
22:19 Growing ASCII Trees
24:50 A Calculator that speaks English
28:56 Professional Reverse Engineer vs Programmers

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Check out my X account for cool Computer Science stuff!
https://x.com/lauriewired

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IOCCC Official Homepage + Source Code:
https://www.ioccc.org/

Official IOCCC YouTube Channel, run by Landon Curt Noll himself!
https://www.youtube.com/@OurFavoriteUniverse

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