advent-of-code-2021 VS AdventOfCode2020

Solution on GitHub.

I learned Zig first from the official guide at https://ziglang.org/learn/getting-started/, then from https://ziglearn.org/. I also used Zig to go through https://adventofcode.com/2020, which more about solving given tasks. At certain point you will be ready to read source code of Zig's std library in place for documentation.

2020 in Rust

Link to full solution

Phew, almost 2 hours of intense coding. This was an incredibly difficult day. Got flashbacks to day 20 of last year.

This is the seventh year puzzles, if you want to check out previous years take a look at: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

It actually was on day 19, it's just that puzzle #13 was the 19th puzzle given out [1]. I'm not sure why the numbers didn't come in order last year.

[1]: https://adventofcode.com/2020 shows the number order

I find that the "advent of code" project always has some nice challenges and you can access the previous years like https://adventofcode.com/2020. They tend to get complex and/or complicated quickly, but usually the first few are easy enogh, while sill giving you a challenge to learn something new.

https://adventofcode.com/2020 gives you well defined, deterministic problems that can be solved in a variety of ways. I'm loving it.

One important thing to note is that all numbers in the input are positive. Since they are all positive it can be solved quite easily in linear time, O(n), and O(1) memory complexity. See algorithm here. I used this algorithm in my Rust solution.