If you squint hard enough, the needs of competitive programming and those of the recent Java "on-ramp" initiative share something. Namely, simple, focused functionality that can be used out of the box. On-ramp, though, does not necessarily have to be performant.
Looking at Scanner, I see that the methods you mentioned haven't changed since 2007. I wonder if it is possible to improve their performance to a sufficient degree without introducing too much complexity, let alone a dedicated class, which, let's be honest, at face value would look out of place in the JDK. -Pavel On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 1:27 PM Connor Detroit <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, I am a java competitive programmer. In most competitions, parsing input > using java.util.Scanner is too slow to meet strict time limits. This forces > participants to manually write out lengthy custom FastScanner classes > (usually based on BufferedReader and StringTokenizer) for every submission > Many other competitive programmers and I would like to add a FastScanner so > we don't have to implement it every time. It would include only the > essential methods of the standard Scanner (nextInt(), nextLong(), next()), > making it run much faster. > I hope this utility can be considered for a future version of Java; I think > competitive platforms will also update their Java version to the latest one > Best regards, > Maxim.
