aoc23-alpha

Advent of Code 2023 solved with 25 languages, in alphabetical order.

Languages are how we express and develop computational ideas; a dialogue between the programmer & designer. I know most of the popular ones, so I picked some cool specimens that I'm curious about.

I did a similar thing once before in 2021, but that challenge had relatively tamer languages. This year will be a little more “out there.”

Schedule

As usual, the hardest problems are at the end, so it's a balance between coolness and the practicality of me actually being able to solve the challenges.

1. A is for ARM64 Assembly — ARMv8.5-A
2. B is for BQN — finally, an APL for your flying saucer
3. C is for Carp — a statically typed lisp, without GC, for real-time applications
4. D is for Dafny — a verification-ready programming language
5. E is for Erlang — practical functional programming for a parallel world
6. F is for Flix — polymorphic effect system and first-class Datalog constraints
7. G is for Gleam — a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale
8. H is for Haskell — GHC 9.8.1
9. I is for Io — dynamic prototypes in the same realm as Smalltalk and Self
10. J is for Java bytecode — write once, run anywhere
11. K is for Koka — functional language with effects
12. L is for Lean — interactive theorem prover
13. M is for Mojo — Python with systems and metaprogramming features
14. N is for Nim — compiled, garbage-collected systems programming
15. O is for OCaml — OCaml 5.1.0
16. P is for Pony — capabilities-secure, high-performance actors
17. Q is for Qi — lightweight, fast interpreted language written in Chinese
18. R is for Raku — formerly known as Perl 6
19. S is for Swift — Swift 5.8.1
20. T is for Tcl — a very simple programming language
21. U is for Unison — purely functional language for distributed systems
22. V is for Vale — single ownership with constraint references for memory safety
23. W is for WebAssembly — Wasmtime v15 with Rust
24. Y is for Yuescript — a Moonscript dialect that compiles to Lua
25. Z is for Zig — general-purpose systems, without garbage collection

We're skipping X because the only reasonable language I could find was x86-64 assembly, and I'm definitely not solving day 23 in assembly!

Development

First, create a .env file containing your session token from the Advent of Code website, so that the input data can be downloaded. For example:

SESSION=30b5d4e5790f02d4c32c71f59f10d5f2f6adfcf5b4c064c64a689ab02b4beb3e84bf74857e40cc9fe31088972fedeb64

Then, if you have Python 3 and Just installed, as well as the language runtime for a given day's solution, you can load the input data and run the solution with:

just run <day1|day2|...>

Each day's solutions are located in their respective folder dayN. The source code reads from standard input, and it is executed using the script run.sh.

Complete Run

If you have all of the required packages for the 25 languages installed, you can run all of the solutions sequentially with the command:

just run-all

Runtime Environment

This is my runtime environment for each language on macOS Ventura v13.2.1, M1 / ARM64 processor, with Rosetta 2 and Xcode CLT. I only used languages that I could install on my own machine; these instructions aren't guaranteed to work on other operating systems or processor architectures.

• Day 1: Apple clang version 14.0.3, target arm64-apple-darwin22.3.0
• Day 2: CBQN 0.4.0, vendored as submodule and built with Make
• Day 3: Carp 0.5.5, binary installation in script
• Day 4: Dafny 4.3.0 via VSCode extension, with dotnet-sdk 8.0.100 installed via Homebrew Cask
• Day 5: Erlang/OTP 26.0.2, installed from Homebrew
• Day 6: Flix 0.42.0, included in script, with Java runtime OpenJDK 21.0.1 from Homebrew
• Day 7: Gleam 0.32.4, installed from Homebrew, with Erlang/OTP 26.0.2
• Day 8: GHC 9.8.1, Cabal 3.10.2.0, installed via GHCup 0.1.20.0; with LLVM 12.0.1
• Day 9: Io Programming Language, v. 20151111 installed via Homebrew for x86-64
• Day 10: Jasmin v2.4, from Homebrew, with OpenJDK 21
• Day 11: Koka 2.4.2, installed from the script on the website
• Day 12: Lean 4.3.0, installed with the elan version manager, via Homebrew
• Day 13: Mojo 0.6.0 (d55c0025), via proprietary installer
• Day 14: Nim 2.0.0, from Homebrew
• Day 15: OCaml 4.12.0, installed via opam 2.1.0, from Homebrew
• Day 16: ponyc-release-0.55.1-arm64-darwin, from ponyup nightly-20230822, with manually patched symlinks for libressl libcrypto.50.dylib -> libcrypto.52.dylib and libssl.53.dylib -> libssl.55.dylib
• Day 17: Qi 21b3195, vendored as submodule and built with Make
• Day 18: Rakudo 2023.11 from Homebrew, implementing Raku 6.d
• Day 19: Apple Swift 5.8.1, targeting arm64-apple-macosx13.0
• Day 20: Tcl 8.6.13 from Homebrew
• Day 21: TBD
• Day 22: TBD
• Day 23: Rust 1.72.1, with Wasmtime 16.0.0
• Day 24: Yuescript 0.21.3, vendored as submodule and built with Make, and Lua 5.4.6
• Day 25: Zig 0.11.0, from release binary (zigup)

Note that while exact version numbers are provided above, the code will likely work with newer versions of these languages as well. Also, assume a global dependency on Python 3.11+, Node v20, and NPM v9.