We are planning to remove JAR option from the list of languages that we support on our platform. The reasons being:
It makes plagiarism detection very difficult for us during a contest. This is the primary reason of not having it during the contest.
We have to keep updating JAR compiler along with JAVA compiler, and often in the past this has been missed causing hassles to our users link
Writing code for our editors that needs to handle JAR submissions differently.
Before we remove the support for JAR, we wanted to have your feedback. Users who are using JAR would have to switch to just using JAVA once the support is removed. Please let us know your views.
I don’t think this will be fair to people using JAR as their primary language . As far as point 1 is concerned why don’t Codechef work on improving plagiarism detection in JAR .
IMO support = up to date compilers, therefore most languages don’t have any support at all.
JAR is basically an archive. If it contains the JAVA source code, I don’t see how one could benefit from submitting an archive instead of the source only. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t qualify as a solution (same as how we’re supposed to submit sources on GCJ and the like). Therefore, I think there’s no reason to keep it - it provides nothing from the “more languages for people who code in other languages” point of view.
I do not know whether there is a lot of people using JARs (maybe @admin has some statistics). It’s quite complicated (comparing to Java source code copy & paste or upload) to upload JAR.
What I wanted to achieve was to implement native library for JAR for quick reading of input (something like fast I/O for Java), that’s the only reason why I wanted to use it.
As a developer I understand very well, that maintaining functionality that is not used much costs a lot of effort.
Regarding the plagiarism detection, there are challenges for sure. In other “languages” there is just one source file in JAR there can be a lot of classes. And I think we need plagiarism detection a lot more than JAR uploads.
If there is not an for-free support possible, I’d say lets drop it and focus the energy for other already implemented feature enhancements or new features
I can see some benefits - you can have multiple classes (source files) which as far as I know is not supported for any other language (which is kind of unfair). Then I can imagine easily, that someone can create his library of classes solving concrete algorithms and building the solution from such pieces. There are tools that can “merge” your external JAR with your source in such way it is as small as possible. So even if you create huge library only relevant parts will be in your JAR.
I also agree there are some languages I know JavaScript f.e. (I tried in the past) that are not working…
We have took a decision to remove support for JAR on the platform. Future contests and practice problems will not have JAR language option from next week on-wards. Existing JAR submissions will still be available on the website.
