IOCCC Hat-Trick

A hat-trick is three positive achievements in a single match. I learned this term through the winner announcement for IOCCC29. It's the first time I got multiple awards in IOCCC for the same year.

A short summary of what I made is below, together with links to what's published on my homepage. The archives at my homepage contain a bit more detail than what's published on IOCCC's site.

• fern.c: a message-to-C encoder, with the notable feature that the output contains mostly "zoltraak". This intended to be a single-keyword language with no operands. It took me ~1.5 months to write this one. (manual, notes)
• kurumi.c: another message-to-C encoder, but this one encodes messages via compiler warnings, with support to multiplex messages via tab/spaces differences between GCC and Clang. This tab versus spaces difference was the most surprising discovery for me, but I was afraid it would be fragile so I added Ruby and Perl decoder as well. It took me ~1 month to make this one. (manual, notes)
• ubel.c: line-based file cutting multitool. The most difficult gimmick here is to be able to survive and detect single-line deletes, which required a lot of redundancy. The head/tail/prime-detector features were all planned from the start, while the Ruby/Perl/Brainfuck features are planned fillers -- I reserved some space to insert Ruby or Perl because I knew I would have filler space left, I just didn't how much space would be actually available until the C parts are done. This one also took ~1 month of work. (manual, notes)

Now, this is the first time I have won multiple awards in the same IOCCC year, mostly because this is the first time since 2011 where I have submitted multiple entries for the same IOCCC year. I was able to focus on a single entry and win with that one entry from 2012 to 2020, but my single entry in 2024 did not win. That was truly disappointing, so this time I wasn't fooling around. I recall one other point in my life where I worked extra hard for similarly misguided reasons, and it was one year when my manager told me not to write any negative peer review comments since he has trouble explaining them to the promotion committee. So the end result is that someone else got promoted, and I filed multiple patents out of spite. I was a bit surprised to find that all three of my submissions won this time, and that success might have been driven by emotions that weren't in previous submissions.

I am happy to be honored with a hat-trick this time. If there is a next time, I hope to go back to a single focused entry.

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