May 16, 2014 Arena Update – New SRM and Marathon Match Deployment!

Yesterday we did a deployment to the SRM/MM backend which added some new excited features to the [topcoder] competition platform:

1. Java 8
We’ve updated our Java version to JDK 1.8.0_05! This means Java coders can now use lamda expressions, a new date and time api, filter/map/reduce operations on collections, as well as many other new language features. We implemented this based on a community request.

2. Peak Memory Usage in SRMs
When running tests in SRMs the system now records and reports back to the competitor the peak memory used during his code execution. This is supported in all languages.

3. Large memory support for C++, Python and Java
Problems can now be configured with arbitrarily large memory limitations. Support in .NET is coming soon.

4. Groundwork for Web Arena
This release lays significant groundwork for our ongoing efforts to create a web-based arena client. Web clients can now talk to the arena backend over websockets, and can login to arena using the consolidated cookie-based login process. We’re looking forward to sharing an alpha release of web arena in approximately two months.