Main is usually a function, so when is it not? (2015)

The reason that I use C many of times is not because of its speed but because it (almost) completely reveals it inner working even when there is clear reason not to do so. (1) Though it is bad for most of time but still I feel more contended sometimes with it, especially for complex code. (2) Even if this transparency is at superficial level with optimising compilers, but there are very few high level optimisation applied to C code…

Can be both, a string and a function: char main [/*x86*/] __attribute__ ((section(".text")) )="WTYH)9Zj8_j7H)9]R" "H)9^\350\0\0\0\0H)1^R" "H))Z8<2u\366j<)9Xj9" ")9j9VY)<$[S_H\xbd^[" "H$@\xcd\200-XP\xf" "\5XP_j<W\xeb\xe2]" "Hello World!\n"; /*Linux_Only!*/

Here is a link to the several times this has appeared here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jroweboy.github.io I find these "hey there is this language called C and you can do some really weird stuff in it!" articles humorous because from the beginning of time there have been people who are fascinated by this aspect of the C language and gave rise to the whole obfuscated C contest thing. The idea that a symbol references an address and its type is only a convenience…

Well, if you really want to confound things you could write your own __start which is typically the entry point called by the kernel, which in turn calls `main()`. But actually that's just by convention: C (and C++) programs drop `__start` into the binary and then tell the linker to mark the binary (mostly an ELF file these days, thank goodness) to indicate that the entry point is the symbol `__start`. There can be different versions depending on how many…