Advent of Code Solutions in Rust

This repository contains my solutions for the Advent of Code challenges, written in Rust. Advent of Code is an annual set of Christmas-themed programming challenges that cover a variety of topics and difficulty levels.

Parallelization with Rayon

To enhance performance, especially for computationally intensive tasks, these solutions utilize the Rayon. Rayon is a data-parallelism library for Rust, which makes it straightforward to convert sequential computations into parallel ones. It is particularly effective for CPU-bound tasks and can significantly improve the execution time of solutions.

Structure

The solutions are organized by year and day. Each year has its own directory, and within each year's directory, there are Rust files for each day of the challenge.

Input Data Structure

Each challenge expects its input data to be placed in a specific folder structure under the data directory. The expected structure is as follows:

data/<YEAR>/day<DAY>

For example, for Day 19 of the 2024 challenges, the input file should be located at:

data/year2024/day19

The program reads this input file as demonstrated in the following code snippet:

impl Day19 {
    pub fn new() -> Self {
        let data = fs::read_to_string("data/year2024/day19").expect("Cannot read data file");
        // -- snip --
    }
}

Make sure to either update the input file path in the code or place the input file in the correct folder before running the solution.

Running the Solutions

To run a solution, use the cargo command-line tool. The binary allows you to specify the year, day, and part of the challenge you want to execute.

Usage

cargo run --release -- --year <YEAR> --day <DAY> --part <PART>

Example

cargo run --release -- --year 2023 --day 1 --part 1
cargo run --release -- --help

Visualizations

Some challenges include visualizations to better understand or demonstrate the problem-solving process. Visualizations are implemented as separate binaries under the src/bin folder and can be run independently.

Running a Visualization

To run a visualization, use the following command:

cargo run --bin <BINARY_NAME>

Example

For the visualization of Day 14 in 2024:

cargo run --bin visual24-14

The visualization binaries are organized in src/bin and are implemented using the macroquad library. The visualization for each day will open a graphical window with interactive or dynamic elements showcasing the problem and its solution.

Contributing

While this is primarily a personal project for learning and fun, suggestions and improvements are welcome. Please feel free to open an issue or pull request.