It’s such a shame. Day 4 part 2 took me much longer to codify my idea in Rust correctly than I would like to admit.
I’m so tempted to switch to a simpler language, but I wouldn’t learn Rust then.
I started off this year with Go, and after the first three days, I was so happy to switch to Rust for today. It’s one of my absolute favorite programming languages, but I never use it at work, so it’s one of my joys of Advent of Code.
The struggle is worth it
Rust isn’t even that difficult, at least when comparing it to languages that fill a similar niche, like C++.
It’s of course more difficult than higher level languages, but for a systems language it manages very well to balance ease of use with the power to code relatively close to the hardware. Rust just has a “slight” entry barrier, with the Borrow Checker being a rather unique feature. Once one has surmounted that, it’s surprisingly smooth sailing, because Rust doesn’t have nasty surprises. Unless one intentionally does something stupid, the rule is “if it compiles, it works”.
Day 1 wasn’t so bad, depending on approach. People got tripped up hard with replacing strings because of the old “twone.” If you didn’t happen to do string replacements it wasn’t so bad.
Day 3 absolutely wrecked me though - and my overall rank was still pretty significantly better than it had been on days 1 and 2.
On the flip side, twone absolutely ruined my life. Worst part was that I was looking at it and thinking “yes I handled that edge case and am only taking the first number, why’s it not working”
Everything else has been a breeze. I’m using typescript and it’s been chill.
If you didn’t happen to do string replacements it wasn’t so bad.
Yeah. I was using regex to find the numbers as a quick implementation before realizing that floor. Just switched it to use a positive lookahead to solve that issue.
Day 3 was one of those challenges that if you thought of a good method quickly it wasn’t too bad. Ended up compiling strings and using regex again. Worked really well actually.
Not only replacing didn’t work. I did it as a regex, but Rusts regex crate only supports non-overlapping matches.
Python’s
realso only supports non-overlapping matches and only one direction, so what I did wasspoiler
I looked for the first digit/word using the regex. Then for the last digit/word, I inverted the string and the regex (so I was matching the words eno, owt, eerht, etc.) and took the first occurence, and inverted that in case it was a word, and then I had my last digit. I just had to pay attention to only include the
|\dafter inverting the regex, sinced\|is not right.There are probably more elegant ways, but I couldn’t come up with anything as simple as this.
Oh, nice.
I just replaced those compounded words with their non-overlapping counterparts.Oh, cool, I did pretty much the same thing, just finding the words manually instead (didn’t want to use any external libraries, so I just wrote a function to search for me. Haskell doesn’t have much for OOT B functionality).
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I didnt even finish part 1 of day 3
Day 1 was easy for me, because the standard library of the language I use has both a method for searching for the first substring, that matches a predicate, and one for the last one.
Day 3 was a little tricky though, I concur.
![[2023 Day 4] Difficulty is all over the place](https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/417aa04d-ce09-4539-97b6-8b5dd0ed0fbb.png){kind=link}