Advent of Code 2023

Writeups

Day1

I have only had very minor exposure to programming in Zig, and was excited to learn the language a lot better this year. Some immediate things that stood out to me was how much was checked by the compiler. It feels like a mini-rust of sorts. The optional and error types are also highly appreciated. Some slight annoyances with the langauge include unsued variables being a compile error and the slightly wacky loops.

In part b, I also discovered that the sentinel value of a pointer or slice is also included in the type, which I found pretty neat. The saturating subtracting operator is also some nice sugar.

Day2

Day 2 involved a bit of parsing. My solution for this just involved string splitting over and over again. I wonder how efficient this is? Perhaps a better approach would be to make a single pass across the line using an iterator and have a state machine to decide what we are parsing?

Day3

Day 3 in all honesty gave me quite a hard time. This was perhaps due to lack of understanding of the containers in the standard library, leading to perhaps some really bad code. I also struggled quite a lot with writing nice code using zig's loops, which behave slightly different to what you would expect from most other languages. I would like to revisit this question when I get a bit better at the language perhaps.

Day4

Pretty clean solution using hashmap to check for winning numbers. Second part of question was also a nice 1D DP solution. I did misunderstand the question and thought you win a copy of the card of the number that you matched, leading to an unnecessary topological sort implmenatation :P.