I am planning to use Rust this year to refresh my knowledge after having not used it for six months or so. I’m contemplating doing some solution visualisation this year, as I’m always impressed by that when others do it - but very much time availability dependent.

I’m going to try to use both zig and gerbil. Usually i use clojure, so might fallback to that as well. I started doing puzzles from 2015 this week, and that’s been fun so far

I’m using rust. I’m hoping I’ll be able to finish all the days unlike last year.

Using C primarily, as before. I’m not sure if I’ll do all days this time, the later days tend to take up much time and stress me out.

I’ve done it with a new language each year in the past, but this year I decided to do it with stuff I’m very familiar with - with an added twist: I have to visualize something for each day.

So I built myself a little app/puzzle harness that serves up the sample/puzzle input and provides some boilerplate so I can just write the x-data for a new Alpine.js module for each day. Then I setup d3 and plan to visualize something for each day using it. For example, I just settled on a simple bar graph (final value of each row) for each part of day 1:

Hoping once it inevitably gets to grids and such, I can do something more interactive. Would love to have something where I can animate or manually step through each step of the solution (such as the pathfinding algorithm last year).