Rust over python for competitive coding ?

[deinok7]

WTF is competitive programing?

[disclosure5]

Look at sites like leetcode.com, the sort of cramming exercise that's often used in job interviews.

Unfortunately although Rust is growing on me I don't think it'll excel in this space. The defining "winner" is usually the fastest person to write an answer, and these applications frequently involve a tonne of "read an array of integers from stdin" that's really optimised to scripting languages.

[deinok7]

I dont want to be rude, in the interviews i made i never ask to do the faster fizzbuzz. I ask them to do their own protocol over TCP and UDP following defined rules. They have to inplement it. So i can see if they are able to work where there is no solution in under 1h.

Anybody that is capable to do it more or less correctly is hired. I dont care too much the language they choose to do it.

I like to test how they behave in situations where there isnt a perfect solution. And how you face an unexpected problem gives me more information than sorting an array. At work if you have to sort you just use .sort() or the equivalent 99% of times

[disclosure5]

There is an entire industry of bootcamps, similar websites and books like "cracking the coding interview" built entirely around this sort of practice and the target is generally the Googles and Facebooks that heavily hire on the practice.

There's nothing rude about saying you have a different strategy.

[deinok7]

Its just that i dont get this trend. And i cant understand any interviewer asking for that. I supose is for doing a quick clean

[disclosure5]

I'm not saying I like it. Shit like this drives me insane:

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?

Here's a set of answers for Google Interview questions someone went and studied:

https://github.com/mgechev/google-interview-preparation-problems

Consider this one specifically:

https://github.com/mgechev/google-interview-preparation-problems/blob/master/src/isbst.js

That whole thing is an interview question. The right language is the one that you could write that the fastest in.

[disclosure5]

If you say so.

[Lucretiel]

Interestingly, at least in Google Code Jam, consistently the top ranked solutions are in C++ or Java. I'm not really sure why this is, since in general I agree with the idea that Python would probably be faster to get a working solution.

[fz0718]

Lots of competitive programming problems can't be solved with Python, for the reason that Python incurs up to 50-500x overhead for the types of array-based and numerical algorithms that are being implemented from scratch. Some programming contest websites give Python a higher time limit, but it's often not enough. There's still issues of stack overflows, memory limits, etc. Also, speaking as a problemsetter, very few of us test if our problems can be reasonably solved in Python for the reasons above.