Hello,
Just finished my first puzzle (the Ticket To Ride Community puzzle), which was a lot of fun, but there were two things I would have liked to see in the tool:
-
Confirmation tests should say if they failed, or timed out.
The solutions to these two situations are completely different, and it would be good to know which one to pursue. I spent a lot of time coming up with (and fixing) ever more convoluted edge-cases until I realised my original fix was completely fine and just needed optimising.
Through all this my code passed the puzzle tests, so I was gettting no feedback or guidance from there. -
Add ability to run your own test scenarios (setup/result) along with the puzzle-defined ones.
When investigating edge cases I wanted to test some nasty situations, so I came up with some extra puzzles/answers. I couldn’t find a place to run these in the IDE so I ported the whole thing to a Visual Studio wrapper and worked on them there.
It would be pretty trivial to provide a system to add user-defined test cases, so you can do this and stay within the IDE.
Also I noticed when I saw the sample solutions that several of them set compiler-specific optimisation flags in the first line. You should have compiler optimisation on by default if you’re going to time the tests!
Anyway, it was all a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to having a go at some more.
