The International Obfuscated Code Contest (IOCCC) has been announced to resume after a four-year hiatus, as per the official announcement on their website. The IOCCC28 event marks a significant milestone in the history of the competition, which has been conducted since 1984. Submissions for the contest will be accepted from January 31 to April 2, 2025. A notable change in this year’s competition is the allowance of using UTF-8 encoding in the source code, unlike previous editions.
Participants of the competition are expected to write code that is deliberately complex and confusing, making it challenging to analyze and understand the problem being solved. However, at the same time, the code should be intriguing and noteworthy, showcasing unique designs or unexpected aspects of the programming language. The source code of the program should not exceed 4096 bytes, and the program must be able to be compiled and executed to demonstrate a meaningful action. Previous competitions have seen the creation of various projects such as games, an IBM PC emulator, an HTTP server, a text recognition system, a ray tracing engine, and a PDF generator.
