Skip to content

Advent of Code in Rust

Level: 201 · working knowledge

One line: Advent of Code is twenty-five puzzles every December, each opening with a text-parsing problem — which makes it a Rust strings, iterators and Result workout more than an algorithms one, for the first ten days at least.

Stub — an outline, not a lesson. There is no runnable example behind this page yet, so nothing on it has been through the check that backs every other claim in this library. The bullets below are the questions the finished page has to answer.

What it has to cover

  • Which Rust each early day actually exercises: lines(), split_once, parse::<i64>(), collect::<Result<Vec<_>, _>>(), HashMap entry counting, grids as a flat Vec
  • A project layout that survives twenty-five days: one binary per day under src/bin/, tests that use the puzzle's example input from the text
  • Why your personal puzzle input should not be committed to a public repository — check the site's own wording on its about page ↗ before writing the rule down
  • When unwrap is fine (a puzzle) and what the same code would need in a program somebody else runs — unwrap is a TODO
  • Performance: --release, and the days where the algorithm matters more than the language
  • Which days map onto which library sections — a table to fill in as the pages get written

The trap it exists for

Writing every day as one main full of unwrap and index arithmetic, then solving part two by copy-paste. The parsing is the same across both parts; a parse(input) -> Result<Puzzle, _> function written on day one is the habit that pays back by day five.

Where this sits

Exercises compares the practice tracks by stage. Advent of Code is a seasonal one, harder in its second half than anything else on that shelf. KATAS.md is this library's own sequence.

See also

If you are coming from another language

  • Python. Most published solutions are Python, and they make a good comparison: the same parsing in Rust is longer because every int() becomes a Result you decide about.
  • Go. Go solutions look closer to Rust's shape — explicit errors, explicit types — without the iterator chains.

Po polsku

Advent of Code to 25 łamigłówek publikowanych co grudzień; każda zaczyna się od parsowania tekstu, więc pierwsze dni to raczej trening napisów, iteratorów i Result w Ruście niż algorytmiki. Dobry nawyk od pierwszego dnia: osobna funkcja parse, testy na przykładzie z treści zadania, a nie na własnych danych wejściowych.

Szukaj po polsku: Advent of Code w Ruście · zadania programistyczne · advent of code rust template · rust parsing input lines