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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why this sort of thing is interesting. Let's say you can program 2048 in 487 bytes of C ... and then someone else comes along and they can program it in 387 bytes of C. So what? Is there a use case in the year 2014 where 100 bytes matter?

How many bytes would it take to code it in C in a human readable fashion? Such that some other programmer could look at it, understand it, modify it, fix bugs, etc?

Is the savings in bytes going from the latter case to the former case really an issue in 2014, and does it outweigh the downside (which I think is enormous) of generating obfuscated code?

Having said all that, as an exercise purely in "how small can by code be, regardless of how obfuscated I make it", I suppose it is ... interesting?

but even still I have to admit I don't get the appeal

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Dude, it's just for fun. It's done in the same spirit as making speed runs for video games. Does everything have to be completely utilitarian?

Point taken. I think I need to take a vacation

It's also very good mental exercise, since it forces you to think even more about the corner cases of the language and its syntax. Even if you won't be using all these corner cases in production code (hopefully), it will make you a better programmer.

I find that reading minified/obfuscated code really helps with spotting syntax errors and related subtle bugs in regularly formatted code. Instead of relying on cues like indentation, you begin to parse more like a compiler, and things like missing semicolons stand out.

Although the obfuscated case is really pushing it in terms of code usability and readability, being able to write miniaturized code is really important in some industries (ie defense projects).

Take for example the Kinetis KL02 ( http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/25/freescale-kinetis-kl03/ ). With only 32KB of storage and 4KB of RAM, writing efficient code with a small footprint is important. These microprocessors can be used to make swarms of autonomous fly sized drones, and programmers that can cram more procedures into those 32KB are extremely rare and useful.

That could be true for other embedded projects as well, but then it's the size of the executable binary that is of concern, not necessarily the size of the source code on your development box.

Exceptions like C++ templates exist (in which a small amount of source can expand to a huge binary), but usually there tends to be a general correlation between the size of the source and the binary.

Trying to write as little source code as possible also leads to trying to find the simplest, most concise algorithm to do a particular task, and that also has effects on the binary size.

This isn't C++. Just adding whitespace, descriptive variable and function names and comments wouldn't add any size to the resulting binary since the code is semantically the same. Using library functions can keep your amount of lines low, but you get that back when at link time if you do static linking at least. Wouldn't you prefer maintainable code that people can easily understand. I just want this said since obfuscated minimal C code isn't the same as minified JS.

Algorithms is an interesting case since you have to ask if you are optimizing for size or speed, as an example you can implement a linear search in fewer lines of code than binary search. Does that mean that linear search is a better more optimized choice. It does if you are optimizing for small executable binary size.

Think of it as a puzzle.

Checkout the demoscene stuff and superpacking JS.

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