aoc VS adventofcode

Personally I just stick to raw arrays for most days, usually with static storage (so pre-allocated). Keeps things simple! Here's my repo.

- C -

Here's my solution. Sorry, I did go a bit overboard making it compact.

That was one heck of a tough day but also very satisfying. I spent quite some time working out a 3D rectangle splitting/merging algorithm on paper and then I had to go and implement that in C. It turned out pretty clean and idiomatic, if I may say so!

This was my first attempt (or at least in a very long time) at generating video. Here I'm generating raw RGB frames in memory and writing them to ffmpeg, which works well enough but it's a little primitive.

At 50 year sold and very stable, C must be one of the easiest languages to get working on old machines. Required just some of the polyfills I wrote back in 2020.

My original solution checked every character against every other character, which performed perfectly fine even for 14 chars, but it felt wrong.

- C -

First a straightforward solution with a double buffer, later realised you could do it in-place by just holding onto one value per row/column.

First wrote a short AWK program to convert the input to C and play with it while running a hopeless brute force attempt.

Part one went fairly fast, but spent quite some time on getting part two right. I settled on the approach of just iterating over the grid and using a boolean to see if I had to count elements or not. However, I had some issues figuring out when to swap, this post by /u/rogual helped me figure it out. After that I lost quite some time on an error that only occurred with my input, not with the example input. It turned out that my loop (which I take form my p1 solution) didn't include the start node, which caused all sorts of counting issues.

[Language: Elixir] https://github.com/mathsaey/adventofcode/blob/master/lib/2023/4.ex