aoc21-alpha

Advent of Code 2021, but I solve the puzzles with 25 different programming languages starting with each letter of the alphabet.

The goal of this exercise was to learn some less-common programming languages that I've been curious about, in various paradigms, compilation modes, and historical contexts. Whenever there was a choice between multiple excellent languages for a given day's puzzle, I chose the one that I had the least familiarity with.

This was obviously intellectually challenging and pretty tough on environment setup, but hey, challenge is an essential part of exploration! ✨

Learnings

See LEARNINGS.md for some final observations about this experience.

Schedule

To make things a little more tractable, I'm going through the alphabet in reverse order, since the hardest problems are at the end.

1. Zig — problem, solution
2. x86 Assembly — problem, solution
3. WebAssembly — problem, solution
4. V — problem, solution
5. Unix Shell (Zsh) — problem, solution
6. TypeScript — problem, solution
7. Scala — problem, solution
8. Ruby — problem, solution
9. Q (SQL) — problem, solution
10. Prolog — problem, solution
11. OCaml — problem, solution
12. Nim — problem, solution
13. MoonScript — problem, solution
14. Lisp (SBCL) — problem, solution
15. Kotlin — problem, solution
16. Julia — problem, solution
17. Idris — problem, solution
18. Haskell — problem, solution
19. Go — problem, solution
20. F# — problem, solution
21. Elixir — problem, solution
22. Dart — problem, solution
23. Crystal — problem, solution
24. Boolector (BTOR) — problem, solution
25. AssemblyScript — problem, solution

Development

First, create a .env file containing your session token from the Advent of Code website, so that the input data can be downloaded. For example:

SESSION=30b5d4e5790f02d4c32c71f59f10d5f2f6adfcf5b4c064c64a689ab02b4beb3e84bf74857e40cc9fe31088972fedeb64

Then, if you have Python 3 and Just installed, as well as the language runtime for a given day's solution, you can load the input data and run the solution with:

just run <day1|day2|...>

Each day's solutions are located in their respective folder dayN. The source code reads from standard input, and it is executed using the script run.sh.

Complete Run

If you have all of the required packages for the 25 languages installed, you can run all of the solutions sequentially with the command:

just run-all

This takes about a minute on my computer, since it needs to compile code in addition to running it.

Runtime Environment

This is my runtime environment for each language on macOS Monterey v12.0.1, M1 / ARM64 processor, with Rosetta 2 and Xcode CLT. I only used languages that I could install on my own machine; these instructions aren't guaranteed to work on other operating systems or processor architectures.

• Day 1: Zig 0.10.0-dev.2028+ea913846c (brew install zig --HEAD).
• Day 2: Apple clang version 13.0.0, target arm64-apple-darwin21.1.0.
• Day 3: Binaryen version 102 (brew install binaryen).
• Day 4: V 0.2.4 b72a2de (brew install vlang).
• Day 5: Zsh 5.8 (x86_64-apple-darwin21.0).
• Day 6: TypeScript 4.5.4 (npm install -g typescript).
• Day 7: Scala 3.1.0 (brew install coursier && cs install scala3 scala3-compiler).
• Day 8: Ruby 3.0.3p157 for arm64-darwin21 (brew install ruby).
• Day 9: q version 2.0.20 (brew install harelba/q/q).
• Day 10: SWI-Prolog 8.4.1 for arm64-darwin (brew install swi-prolog).
• Day 11: OCaml 4.12.0 (brew install opam && opam switch create 4.12.0).
• Day 12: Nim 1.6.2 [MacOSX: arm64] (brew install nim).
• Day 13: MoonScript dev-1-b7efcd13 (luarocks install moonscript --dev), Lua 5.4.3, LuaRocks 3.8.0 (brew install lua).
• Day 14: Roswell 21.10.14.111 (brew install roswell), SBCL 2.1.11 (ros install sbcl).
• Day 15: Kotlin 1.6.10-release-923 (JRE 17.0.1+1) (brew install kotlin).
• Day 16: Julia 1.7.0 (brew install --cask julia).
• Day 17: Idris2 0.5.1, x86_64 version (arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew install idris2).
• Day 18: GHC 8.10.7, Cabal 3.6.2.0 (brew install ghc cabal-install).
• Day 19: Go 1.17.5, darwin/arm64 (brew install go).
• Day 20: .NET Core SDK 3.1.416 (brew install --cask dotnet-sdk).
• Day 21: Elixir 1.13.1, Erlang/OTP 24.2 (brew install elixir).
• Day 22: Flutter 2.8.1, Dart 2.15.1 (brew install --cask flutter).
• Day 23: Crystal 1.2.2 (brew install crystal).
• Day 24: Boolector 3.2.0 (brew tap mht208/formal && brew install boolector).
• Day 25: AssemblyScript 0.19.22.

Note that while exact version numbers are provided above, the code will likely work with newer versions of these languages as well. Also, assume a global dependency on Python 3.9+, Node v16+, and NPM v8+.