yet another adventofcode impl in Rust

This is the home for my take on Advent of Code ⭐🎄⭐

Although not necessary for writing solutions for Advent of Code in Rust, I've written a utility for structuring the solutions, along with a small CLI for running your solvers. Feel free to fork this repository or use whatever you like, in your own repositories.

If you do wish to fork it, you may want to checkout from before I started implementing solutions.

I'm by no means an expert Rust programmer, but have been playing with it for a couple of years.

Add a new solution

To add a new implementation for a day, you need to do a couple of things. The documented procedure here is a bit oppinionated about declaring each day as a seperate module, split into different modules for each year. You don't need to do that, but can just implement a day however you like, and ensure that it's imported into src/main.rs.

First, you need to write a new file. The file needs to export a struct that implements AdventOfCode. The trait is to be found in src/main.rs and just requires you to implement two methods, one for each part.

To make it easier, there's a template implementation, which can be copied to whereever you want it to be placed in the project.

Ensure the folder we're copying into exists:

mkdir src/years/year2020

cp src/template/template.rs src/years/year2020/day01.rs

After that is done, you can rename the struct to Day01 in the file you just copied.

You need to also export it in src/years/year2020/mod.rs. The following code would do that for you.

mod day01;
pub use day01::Day01;

Ensure that you also export the module itself. In src/years/mod.rs add

pub mod year2020;

Not we need to ensure availability for this module in src/main.rs. This can be done by adding the following in the top of the file.

mod years;

And last, but not least, the CLI needs to call the implementation, given the desired inputs. In the match statement for the variable day in src/main.rs, add a new arm that matches against the following.Make sure to also call

(2020, 1) => Box::new(years::year2020::Day01 {}),

After that's done, you're able run the CLI, which will in turn run the solver for the provided day.

Usage

Given you've followed the instructions in the previous section, you'll now be able to execute your solutions with the CLI.

You can either pass a path to a file, or pipe stdin into the CLI. If you don't provide a path, the CLI will assume that it can read from stdin.

You can pass a path to a file, by prepending --file data/myfile.txt to the arguments list.

Otherwise you may pipe your clipboard contents into the CLI by the way your operating system allows you to do so.

For MacOS that would be pbpaste | ..., and for Linux (assuming xclip), that would be xclip -o | .... There's plenty of other possibilites, so do whatever you're comfortable with

For solving both days, run

cargo run -- --year 2020 --day 1

For solving part 1 only, run

cargo run -- --year 2020 --day 1 --part 1

For solving part 2 only, run

cargo run -- --year 2020 --day 1 --part 2