advent-of-code-2021

I do not guarantee my code to be the fastest, the cleanest, or even the most idiomatic. It is an exploration of the Advent of Code, and an effort to improve my usage of Rust. What I write here is a reflection of my experience, from which I hope to improve my skills coding and problem solving B) I'm not looking at solutions until I've completed a problem, and even then I intend to do so in chunks, so that I can compare more general trends to what others are doing alongside the oppurtunity to pick apart specific questions.

With the (delayed) completion of the AoC 2021, I can definitely say it gets harder in the last week. I initially planned to write a lot more than what I'm writing now, but I realized I'd probably get more benefit reviewing the experience if I kept it succint.

I experienced..

• How nice iterators feel. While Rust's standard library can sometimes feel minimal, I never had a problem with iterator capabilities (windows, map, filter, etc.)
• Using generics and implementing traits! It wasn't necessary, but I'd like ot think it made code more idiomatic and generalizable
• Fights with the borrow checker, which ultimately ended with a better respect for the rules. Kind of seems like a right of passage
• cargo clippy and cargo fmt 👌
• The minimal effort it takes to write a test
• A sense of dread when I decided to clone() something I new would be large
• Self questioning after spending multiple hours trying to do day23p2 by hand
• Inferiority when seeing the performance and time it took people to solve questions

I did not experience..

• Lifetimes, though there were some questions where I thought they might be useful. Makes me wonder how necessary it is to write operational code, and how necessary it is to write fast code
• unsafe - not necessary in the same way life times weren't
• External libraries. I completed everything with std
• Thorough performance testing - though this may be something I'd like to do in the future with a library or flamegraph. I just timed all my binaries
• Macros, docs, custom use of Cargo.toml, and many more...