Chris Feilbach's Blog

This summer my wife and I are holding a competition: who can write the fastest C-based linked list? Your goal is to write a linked list, and code that does various tasks with said list. Other than having to be a linked list, having it being written in C (although if we have enough demand we can extend the framework to other languages!) and having a standard API across submissions, the requirements are yours to define, and the performance is yours to achieve.

We envision this being very useful for undergraduates, graduate students, and early in career engineers and computer scientists. Performance debug is a skill that often isn’t taught at all, and with this competition we hope to change that. We’ll be running your code on a Raspberry Pi 4B (specs to come later), in a statistically sound and significant manner, to see where your code achieves high performance and where it doesn’t.

Another thing that many undergraduates lack is feedback on the code that they write, so we’re aiming to change that, too. Entering the competition gets our eyes on your code, and one of us will provide feedback across a variety of categories, including whether we would allow this into a professional codebase. If that answer is no, we’ll provide information on how to get the code quality to the place where it could be.

This competition extends over multiple weeks, starting June 1st, 2025, and likely ending at the end of the month. Each week we’ll release a new set of objectives that builds on the previous week, likely for a total of four sets of objectives.

We will have a github up soon with our testing framework, and will have the first set of objectives up by June 1st. Note that both of us reside in the United States, so for those of you several hours ahead of us, there may be a several hour delay.

We expect that most of our communication is going to initially be over email, which you can provide using the sign up link below. For this first one, send mail often, tell us what you like and don’t like, and give us any feedback you think is relevant.

This is the first time that either of us have done something like this, so bear with us as we get this going. It’s likely that we’ll be building the infrastructure as you all are writing code. We have big dreams as to what this could turn into. If this is something that piques your interest, we’re asking for $25 (which gets you performance numbers and feedback, for each time that you submit new code).
Late signups are allowed. Send us email at pointerwars2025 at gmail dot com.

If you’re not up for joining, you can still follow along and make use of our testing framework. We just can’t provide performance testing, nor feedback in that case.

Have fun!

(One small addition: My current employer has zero affiliation with any of the above. My wife is the one driving it!)