Advent 2017

This repo contains my solutions to the Advent of Code 2017, written in Rust.

Running

This repo requires a nightly rust compiler as it relies on TryFrom

cargo test is the easiest way to check this code. Test coverage is decent across all challenges.

The individual solutions do not have any I/O, so it's expected that data comes from command line args or stdin, e.g.:

cat day18.data | cargo run duet

Solutions work for all challenges except day 18 part 1. The solution to part 2 was significantly different and so I opted to replace part 1 rather than extend it.

Reflection

This repo served 2 personal purposes:

1. Learn Rust
2. Practice interesting programming problems

Importantly, this repo was not intended to be an example of a well designed system. There are many issues with my implementation both in code quality and overall architecture. I tried to make somewhat reasonable decisions when implementing the challenges, however when a part 2 broke some assumptions I made for part 1, I generally did the minimum to get part 2 to work rather than redesigning my algorithms.

If I were to go back and clean this repo up, my top priorities would be:

• Fix main.rs. Probably replace the cmds with an enum and split the main function into many smaller functions
• Use Result consistently. In earlier challenges, I was struggling enough with the borrow checker and didn't want the overhead of implementing a bunch of error types. As a result, many solutions use Option when Result is much more appropriate.
• Replace regexes with a proper parsing library. Many of my parsing mechanisms use regexes which are not very ergonomic.