README.md

Advent Day of Code 2022

https://adventofcode.com/2022

This year I'm working through the problems in Rust. You can run any of the problems by passing in the day and the part (1 or 2) as params.

Here are a few things that I've learned about Rust in this process:

1. In Day1, I used a BinaryHeap from std::collections to track the calories each elf was carrying so that I could pull out the top three easily. The API for this wasn't as ergonomic as one would hope, but it worked.
2. In Day2, Rust's matching syntax really shined. In other languages I would've just created a static Map, but with match I was able to easily find the points associated with each of the inputs.
3. itertools provides very helpful extensions to Rust iterators. For example, in Day 3 we needed to group every three lines together to be processed in a group. The batching method was very useful for this, although after the fact I found chunks may have been better since that takes a static number whereas batching could be more dynamic.
4. Turn on Clippy in Visual Study Code by setting rust-analyzer.checkOnSave.command to clippy. This provides way better suggestions than the default.
5. Day 13 seemed like a parsing nightmare at first glance, but instead of trying to parse this by hand I turned to nom. I was very surprised at how easy the parsing turned out to be. It also helped that I was reviewing Eric Burden's AOC Solution to the Day 11 problem, which used Nom to parse the input. I also took a page from him with creating a module for the day instead of craming everything into a single file.