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Experimental languages:

If you'd like to see another language added then raise an issue.

Your source code is sent to the interpreter encoded in UTF-8, and is expected to write output encoded in UTF-8 to STDOUT. For languages where it matters, your code is run in the en_US locale with a UTF-8 output encoding.

In Unicode-aware languages like Python, this means print("🙂") and print(chr(0x1f642)) both produce the emoji U+1F642 "Slightly Smiling Face" 🙂, which is encoded as f0 9f 99 82 in UTF-8.

In less Unicode-aware languages where strings are byte strings, you might still get away with UTF-8 in string literals. For example, OCaml treats "🙂" as a string of length 4 (four bytes), but Char.chr 0x1f642 is an error.

In yet other languages, like brainfuck, you have to print the individual bytes f0 9f 99 82 one by one.

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.

Some experimental languages that make heavy use of multi-byte characters (APL, UIUA, 05AB1E, BQN, Vyxal) have a third scoring method that does not yet affect leaderboards or solution saving. This method allows multi-byte characters commonly used in the language to count for only one stroke, while all other characters count as one stroke for every UTF-8 byte in their encoding. Reference PR#2513 for more detail.

For the language specific leaderboard, the best answer gets 1,000 points and the rest will get points inverseley proportional to their length.

For example, if your solution is double the strokes of the the best solution, it will get 500 points for the language specific leaderboard.

For the global leaderboard, instead of using the best score for a language, we use an Par Value, a value always at least as high as the best score in a language.

Getting exactly par will give you 1,000 points, double the length will get half the points etc.

The par for a hole in a language is calculated as follows:

Par = ((√n + 2) ÷ (√n + 3)) × S + (1 ÷ (√n + 3)) × S_a

The formula for par was chosen such that the shortest solution in any language will always receive a score of at least 750.

Your overall score is the sum of your highest points in each hole.