Advent of Code 2022!

Hello Everyone! This is my second year with Advent of code and for a second time I'm programming in Rust. Hopefully it will go smoother than last time!

Overall Features and Goals

• launches from the command line and takes arguments for the day and an input file. Calculates the two results.
• Using the Clap crate this year for command line processing.
• Going to implement tests for the daily challenges with the provided test input and output as test validation.

Day 0 (T minus 1)

• Got the Git repository set up and prepared some input/output functions and command line processing. Added nearly automatic unit tests with macro rules to write the body of the test functions. Much code borrowed from last year, but a much better setup than 2021.

Day 1

• It's begun! First day complete!
• Nothing too special in this code. Used vectors to store data. Decided not to sort and select the top 3 for the second challenge, but used comparisons to select the top 3. Sorting would have been an option for less code (probably just 2-3 lines) but much more processor intensive. I'll be using that in later days I'm sure.

Day 2

• For This Day I built built struct with methods and intended to change the data in the struct between challange 1 and 2. It didn't work out to resuse the struct in a meaningful way, so that was extra coding for no practical benefit.
• I used conditional statements for challenge One and nested match statements for challenge Two. Friends who opted to solve both with hashmaps had a faster answer and less code lines for sure!

Day 3

• Hashmaps were my go-to data structure this day. I think there are some better crates for getting, comparing, and setting values, but I used std only.

Day 4

• These two challenges involved character and line parsing as the primary programming challenge. Since the data sets were short, I went with hard-wired line decoding. Not much use of loops per line as there were only 4 integer data points per line.
• With the data in integers, the remainder of the programming seemed easy as I did not find the logic to be difficult to visualize.

Day 5

• Complete! Took way too long debugging input.
• Challenge 2 was a gift and I only had to change one line!

Day 6

• The main approach was to read the input as an iterator, push the current value and set of comparisons into a HashSet, and then see if there were any dropped duplicates.
• Added LOTS of comments to the code to explain it nearly line by line.

Day 7

• Solved finally! This one took much longer that the others because I wanted to do it the "right" way. Challenge 2 went very quickly.
• Data is stored in a true tree structure with the id_tree crate.
• Made use of Rc and RefCell to deal with mutable and immutable references to the same data source in a loop that were on different arms of a match statement. This is a personal first for me and there was a lot of fighting with the borrow checker.
• Did not use a recurive function for adding values in the tree. An earlier try revealed that this would create a stack overflow. Used loops and temporary storage to accumulate data.Don't judge me harshly.

Day 8

• Solved. Mainly a lot of iterations through rows and columns with loop breaks where possible.
• used the grid crate for 2 dimensional addressing.
• update - It's failing unit tests days later and I don't know why. Puzzle output is still bcorrect. Tests to be debugged.

Day 9

• Solved! This was a fun one.
• Several nested loops. Probably could make this one more performant with some early loop breakouts and definitely by sharing mutable variables to reduce memory operations.

Day 10

• Skipped for now. Check back later.

Day 11

• Solved part One! Rumors are part 2 has a non-obvious mathemetical concept that I'll come back to.
• Reformatted the input into YAML with string slicing. Used serde and serde_yaml to process the input and then procesed it further to get in the structs I wanted. This was the long way around inputting the data, but I wanted to learn the concepts of serialization and deserialization. I spent a lot of extra time on that.
• Also a good use of a VecDeque.

Day 14

• Solved! I tend to prefer the map puzzles, so I liked this one.
• Used the Grid crate and matricies of bool data types for the rocks and sands. I was overal pleased with the organization of this one.

More Days Ahead!

If I get much beyond Day 10, I be doing better than 2021!