4 ms·

That's gotta be generated with a tool, right?

• jibanes 8y ago
  yes
• jstanley 8y ago
  Not necessarily. The first part is clearly hand-edited at minimum, if not completely handwritten: I n t,e,l[80186],*E,m,u,L,a,T,o,r
  • tromp 8y ago
    My 2012 entry similarly started with the self documenting Int L[A],m,b,*D=A, *c,*a=L,C,*U=L,u;s requiring compile time defs -DInt=int/long -DA=500000. But it did include its own Basic I/O System in the source: char*B,I,O;S(){b=b ... "-,&,,/.--/,:-,'/" ".-,-,,/.-,*,//..,"
• lifthrasiir 8y ago
  Uh, not really? I'm pretty sure that identifiers are automatically replaced somehow with conventional editors but a general minification to the degree required by IOCCC is never automatic. If you are interested in an actual minification process of a winning IOCCC entry, Don Yang [1], who has eight (!) winning entries, has put a compressed screencast alongside with recent winning entries (example: [2] is a screencast for [3]). My experience (I too have one winning entry) had been similar. [1] http://uguu.org/ http://uguu.org/ [2] http://ioccc.org/2018/yang/spoiler.html http://ioccc.org/2018/yang/spoiler.html [3] http://ioccc.org/2018/yang/prog.c http://ioccc.org/2018/yang/prog.c
  • chaoticmass 8y ago
    That screencast helped remove some of the mystery behind the method, but I am even more amazed now.
    • lifthrasiir 8y ago
      Actually I do think Yang's screencast is kind of unusual, as he seems to start with a very clear vision and the vision seems to remain intact throughout the process. (Or the screencast may have simply omitted experimentation processes...) By comparison, this [1] is my version of notes towards my winning entry [2], which contains a lot of failed approaches and mistakes :-) [1] https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/3909337 https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/3909337 [2] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/kang/kang.c https://www.ioccc.org/2012/kang/kang.c
      • chaoticmass 8y ago
        This is AMAZING! Thank you for sharing.
• pjc50 8y ago
  Possibly there were some assisting tools, but most likely nothing more complicated than search-and-replace. Handcrafting these things is the whole art of the IOCCC. Many years ago I wrote some obfuscated Perl, assisted by the fact that the language is pretty obfuscated to start with. https://flatline.org.uk/snowflake.pl.txt https://flatline.org.uk/snowflake.pl.txt - I think I may have had a tool to help it fit the template, but since you can't have a space in the middle of an operator restructuring the program to make the operators fit the snowflake was a major part of the effort. While there's an "unobfuscated" version of the emulator program in this thread, it's clearly not the same program - there's no "switch/case" in the obfuscated version.
  • szc 8y ago
    You can turn a switch statement into a series of ? : switch(a) { case x: do1(); break; case y: do2(); break; default do3(); break; } becomes a == x ? do1() : a == y ? do2() : do3(); These structures can be seen in the minimized version (and a few other IOCCC winners :-). This code likely doesn't optimize quite as well. Several cute things you can do with switch statements cannot be translated so easily.
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Aha, found a partially-deobfuscated version: https://gist.github.com/slacka/8306176 https://gist.github.com/slacka/8306176 The instruction decode mechanism is a chain of "e--||(expression), e--|| ..." expressions. At the point where e-- is zero the expression will be evaluated. The program makes heavy use of the equivalence between "index[pointer]" and "pointer[index]", presumably to save brackets.
      • szc 8y ago
        Very true || !false. The 3rd, 4th and 5th ways to encode a switch can be done using <disconnected>