by Arttu Kärpinlehto
Last year I was trying out different tools for different problems, mainly to see if I could produce the solutions with less overhead - kind of using the right tool for the right job. There was some bash in the beginning, then C++, a little bit of Java in the form of Processing, and even PHP for some reason. The weirdest was day 2 solution made with Excel; which I am very proud of.
This season I will try to solve all puzzles with just C++, having recently built myself a very useful VSCode environment. I've also built some scaffolding around the daily puzzles. Basically I only need to create a C++ source file for each day, then iterate between coding and unit test until the solution works, and then run make.
All solutions are linked to a single executable aoc2023. Each puzzle is launched with two parameters, day and part:
aoc2023 1 1
starts day 1, part 1. Optional debug parameter switches on the some debugging output.
Each day solution is in its own C++ source file, eg. day01.cpp
Each puzzle input is in its own text file, eg. day01-input.txt
Main function and simple scaffolding for opening the puzzle input file.
As each puzzle description will have test/example data, those are entered here as unit tests. VSCode extension cpp-unit-test by AutumnMoon is used as the test framework.