Tips and tricks

Customizing test time limits

coman has two time limit options, a soft timeout and a hard timeout. If the soft timeout expires, your program is still allowed to run, but the test outcome is reported as a timeout. After the hard timeout expires, your program is terminated.

By default, the soft timeout is 2 seconds and the hard timeout is 5 seconds. You can customize these by setting soft_timeout and hard_timeout in your Coman.toml to the appropriate number of milliseconds, for example:

soft_timeout = 4000
hard_timeout = 10000

Be sure to put these lines above any language definitions.

Multiple solutions for the same problem

Let's say you have a solution named problem1.cpp, and you have created test cases for it. If you want to create another solution for the same problem, you can create a file named problem1.another.cpp (replace another with any name). This solution will use the same test cases as problem1.cpp.

Compressed test cases

If your test cases are extremely large, then you may compress them with xz (this is the only supported format as of now). After compressing them, their file extensions should be .in.xz or .out.xz. Any input or output file may be compressed independently of the other files; for example, you may compress the input file but not compress the output file, or you may compress only some of the test cases.

Test cases are decompressed before the program is run, so compression will not cause timeouts.