C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

Bender 126 points 19 comments July 06, 2026
www.theregister.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (4 comments)

anthk

On the subleq VM, it would run faster if they implemented Muxleq, but it woudn't win the IOCCC contest maybe. Altough in unobfuscated it's C it's just an extra short if clause with two more lines. On 32k roms for the GB emulator: https://github.com/tbsp/Adjustris Old build: https://pdroms.de/?__df=24010f101611170c163a13544b55553a4d22... Someone ping back the IOCCC creator, please.

RicoElectrico

> Nixie tube is a tiny electrical tube with filaments in the shapes of all the digits stacked one on top of another, and it displays the desired digit by making just that filament glow Lol, no. That's a Numitron (although they were 7 segment)

Refreeze5224

I wonder at what level you could enforce/how far you could take the idea of "don't allow invalid states to be represented" to a programming language, to prevent this kind of language debauchery. C does seem to sit at the perfect intersection of language age and low-level access to allow this kind of competition, whereas something like Go seems far less suited for it. Javascript is routinely obfuscated pretty well for human readers. I'm not familiar enough with Rust to say, but I bet with what little I know of its syntax you could create some pretty ugly stuff?

russfink

TL;DR: the one entry implemented a subleq machine. Google it - it’s a One Instruction Set Computer (OISC). This made me smile. But it also raised a question: when were OISC’s first conceived? Would Apollo and computers of that era have benefitted from this insight?

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