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Test runner reports success when no solutions are executed

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@vivek-3728 is already working on this.

Since Oct 20, 2026.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
76/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python
Domain
testing

Research direction

Start in run.py, where the problem and language filters select solutions and the final exit status checks failures. Run the two example commands from the issue to reproduce the empty successful runs. Update the handling so an empty selection is reported and exits nonzero; verify that matching solutions still run normally.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug good first issue

I noticed that the test runner reports a successful result even when the requested problem or language doesn't match any solutions.

For example, I tested:

python run.py does-not-exist
python run.py prime --lang rs

Both commands produced:

Summary: 0 passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped

The exit code was 0 in both cases. I repeated the tests twice and got the same results.

I expected the runner to report that no matching solutions were found and exit with a nonzero status, rather than treating an empty test run as successful.

Looking through run.py, the problem and language filters can exclude every available solution. However, the final exit status only checks whether any tests failed.

When nothing runs, the failure counter remains zero, so the runner reports success.

This could cause problems in automated verification. For example, a typo in a CI command or an incorrect language selection could skip every test while the pipeline still appears green.

A successful verification run should confirm that at least one matching solution was actually checked. If the selection is empty, the runner should report that explicitly instead of returning success.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
1
Forks
6
Avg merge
22h 23m
Merged PRs (30d)
22

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