Languages

The Runner ships with eighteen toolchains in three families, and they share four images. The catalogue is data: adding a row is a table change, not a redesign.

An id has two levels, because it answers two questions

A participant reading a problem header wants the standard — "C++17". A participant choosing on the submit form needs the toolchain, because g++ and clang++ disagree about enough that a submission accepted by one is occasionally rejected by the other.

So the id carries both: cpp17-gcc, never cpp17. A standard is not a toolchain. cpp17 on its own resolves to nothing and is refused, because guessing which compiler somebody meant is exactly what two levels exist to prevent.

The catalogue

Every C and C++ standard is offered through both compilers, which is what a course teaching a particular standard may legitimately want to pin.

PyPy is a separate row rather than a footnote because the gap changes what a participant can do: a Python solution that times out on CPython frequently does not on PyPy.

What each family accepts, and how it is built

Extensions are matched case-insensitively. A file the chosen toolchain does not accept is refused as a compilation error, not as an infrastructure failure: choosing C++ and uploading main.py is the participant's own mistake, the compiler would have said the same thing thirty seconds later, and a message naming the extensions is more use than a parse error in a language nobody thought they were writing.

-O2 is on every compiled row because a limit is stated against optimised code; judging a debug build would make every limit a different limit.

Python is not compiled, but it does have a build step. py_compile turns a syntax error into one failure a participant can read, rather than into every test failing with the same traceback.

Two ids that resolve but are not offered

cpp and python were the whole catalogue once, and a problem package's config.yml names the language of a checker, an interactor and a model solution using them. They still resolve — cpp to cpp20-gcc, python to python3 — so that packages written against the documented format keep building their own judging programs. A checker and an interactor are built by the same path, in the same image, with the same command as a submission. They are not offered on any form.

cpp resolves to C++20 specifically because that is the standard the single C++ entry carried before the catalogue existed, so a package judged yesterday is judged the same way today.

What is not here

Java and Rust are not in the catalogue and are not accepted. Java was considered and left out for a measurement reason: the JVM reserves address space rather than allocating it, so a memory limit would measure something different for it than for everything else.

Forwarding to an external judge offers six languages including Java and Pascal — by forwarding to a service that runs them, not by running them.

Four images, and a Runner without them judges nothing

Eighteen toolchains share four images because every C and C++ standard is a -std flag rather than an image of its own.

The defaults, and the older AJ_Sandbox__Image__Cpp spelling that is still read, are on Configuration — stated once, so that the two pages cannot drift apart.

The compiler version is a capability the Runner reports, which is why the images are the project's own and pinned rather than a stock compiler image that moves. A tag that moves means two submissions to the same problem were judged by two different compilers.

Building an image of your own

AJ_Sandbox__Image__* will take any image, which is how you pin a compiler version we do not ship or add one to a fork. Four things are expected of it.

The shim, and how to get one

A measured run is started as aj-shim <input-file> <program> [args...]. The shim becomes PID 1, opens the input file onto the submission's standard input, drops to 65534, forks, and reports the child's own processor time and peak memory — see Isolation for what that is worth and why it is not trusted on its own.

Copy ours rather than writing one. It is statically linked and depends on nothing in the image around it:

COPY --from=ghcr.io/algojudge/lang-gcc:0.1.0 /usr/local/bin/aj-shim /usr/local/bin/aj-shim

Pin the same version as the Runner, for the reason the callout above gives about tags that move.

What decides which toolchains a problem allows

Not the Runner. An assignment's configuration may list the languages it accepts, and the Runner refuses anything outside that list as a policy violation — a verdict rather than an infrastructure failure, because the participant chose it, their code may be perfect, and what they broke is a rule of the activity. The submission stays rejudgeable if a manager widens the set afterwards.

An empty list means the assignment said nothing, which allows anything this Runner can build. It is not a way of allowing none.

The list may name a family as well as a toolchain: cpp in an assignment's languages accepts every C++ row. That two-level lookup exists to close a silent failure — a rule keyed on the whole id alone would have found nothing for cpp17-gcc and reported no violations, which reads exactly like a clean submission.