- Do I Need to Log in to Play?
-
No. Submitted solutions will be executed and checked without
logging in, but nothing will be saved and you won't appear on the
leaderboards.
- Is Code Golf Free as in Speech?
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Yes! It is written in Go, licensed under
MIT, and available on
GitHub; patches welcome!
- Is Code Golf Free as in Beer?
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Yes! However hosting isn't, so if you enjoy Code Golf consider
donating to its continued existence and improvement via
GitHub Sponsors.
Sponsors will receive a shiny “Sponsor” badge on their profile
and a warm fuzzy feeling in their heart.
- What Languages Are Supported?
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If you'd like to see another language added then raise an
issue.
- Are Warnings Ignored?
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Yes. Only STDOUT is checked against the solution, STDERR is
however shown back to you to ease debugging.
- How Are Arguments Passed to My Program?
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Some holes pass arguments, for those your program should read them
from ARGV.
- How Are Solutions Ranked?
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There are two scorings in use, bytes and chars. Bytes is the
number of bytes of a solution encoded in UTF-8. Chars is the
number of Unicode codepoints of a solution. Users may submit up to
two solutions per hole per language. This is handled automatically
when you enter two solutions and each minimizes a different
scoring. Each scoring has its own set of leaderboards. For the
chars scoring, both “A” (U+0041 Latin Capital Letter A) and “😉”
(U+1F609 Winking Face) cost the same despite the 1:4 ratio in byte
count in UTF-8.
- How Are Solutions Scored?
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For each hole, in each language, up to 1,000 points are available.
The formula is:
Points =
Sb ÷ Su × 1000
Where Su is the length of the user's solution,
and Sb is a Bayesian estimator of the form:
Sb = ((√n + 2) ÷ (√n + 3))
× S + (1 ÷ (√n + 3)) × Sa
n is the number of solutions in this hole in this language.
S is the length of the shortest solution in this hole in
this language.
Sa is the shortest solution among all languages
in this hole.
The confidence interval is chosen such that the shortest
solution in any language will receive a score of at least 750.
Your overall score is the sum of your highest points in each
hole.
- Are Submissions Resource Constrained?
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Yes. Execution time is limited to 7 seconds, CPU & RAM usage is
unbounded but this will probably change soon. The length of each
solution must be lower than 128 KiB as that's the maximum length
of any program argument under Linux.
- Is There an API?
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An API is currently being developed and documented in standard
OpenAPI format.
A legacy API that just returns scores in JSON exists. The URL is
/scores/all-holes/all-langs/all.
Note that all-holes and all-langs may be replaced by the names of
specific holes and languages.
- Can I See Other People's Solutions?
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No, that way all holes stay competitive. If you're stuck on how to
shave a couple of bytes off your solution then why not drop by
our Discord server for some advice.