We hope you enjoy the 21st IOCCC results - we enjoyed judging the entries.

If you have any feedback on the competition for the Judges, please contact us using the details at http://www.ioccc.org/contact.html

Thanks. SimonC.

Just curious, since you're handy to ask: How do the judges view code that depends on external (but cross-platform and FOSS) libraries? Only Xlib is specifically mentioned in the rules.

I'm specifically thinking of libpng, but I'm sure one could think of other meaningful examples.

I don't know the official policy, but anecdotally, I won with an entry that used libperl back in 2000: http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2000_dlowe

I love this bit of history from the hint :)

Aside: history... Larry Wall wrote the original Perl in 1986-87, the same two successive years he won the IOCCC. I hope this program helps you to realize that this was no fluke - that Perl and Obfuscation are as inseparable as, say, camels and humps.

The fact that it won for "worst abuse of the rules" doesn't help your point much. :-)

Generally we don't like lots of external dependencies. External libraries do change over time - would such an entry work 10 years from now? The judges do use and test the entries using different operating systems. What will operating systems look like in 10 years?

Having said that :-), if the entry has merit on its own and not just because of the external dependency, then it might "win".

(2) and (3) are now fixed.

(2) The mime types for the .c and .h files are now set to text/plain on http://www.ioccc.org.

(3) I (Simon) have added a link to the winning entry that generates the current logo.

Oh, thank you a lot! Should have sent emails before, but I always forget...

Some interesting points. If you have some better ideas about how to organize the data, please submit a proposal to the judges (info here http://www.ioccc.org/judges.html). Even better if you can volunteer the XX or probably YYY hours to actually implement it. The site is statically generated and we want it to remain that way.

As to point (3), the current logo is generated by Matt Zucker's 2011 winning entry. I (Simon) have added a link to it from the logo and a little annotation :-)

... it would be up and running now, but the submit code needs to be fixed (the php code is from 2005) and the server upgraded to use https.

It wasn't really officially discontinued - the public silence made people assume it was done. Lots of excuses could be made, but it really just comes down to focus, energy and time. If you have any of these to spare, please contact the judges! http://www.ioccc.org/contact.html.