Are sites like github.dev acceptable to use to time fastest-code questions? They do specify the specs and are free. What about gitpod, repl.it, and others?
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3\$\begingroup\$ Related: Is TIO acceptable for fastest-code questions? \$\endgroup\$– caird coinheringaahin g ModFeb 25 at 1:40
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The question asker gets to decide; doesn't mean it's a good idea
Pretty much all of the site "rules" are just defaults that the challenge author can override. If you want to use github.dev as the scoring method, that's allowed.
However, it probably isn't a good idea to use cloud services like this for fastest-code, for a few reasons.
- These services almost certainly use shared vCPUs, which means there's some overhead and stuff that won't be perfectly consistent
- Inevitably, these services will either stop working, or upgrade their servers. Twenty years from now github.dev will not be using twenty year old hardware, for one reason or another, and that breaks scoring for future answers. (You could retime all the old ones, but you'd first have to notice an upgrade occurred. Plus, this would likely give an advantage to newer answers, which could optimize for the correct hardware)
- There's no guarantee github.dev or repl.it is fungible; different datacenters might have slightly different servers, and things like that, since most of the time the exact hardware doesn't really matter that much when you're running things like VS Code or Python
