🎄 Day 11
In C3
It was time to switch languages, and so i chose C3 because my friend Yeti suggested it. From todays
experience, it seems to me that C3 is really unfinished; the docs are lacking, the examples are
outdated and i even encountered a compiler bug on a thing as trivial as using *= on an array index
(array[i] *= x). Of course it is a very new and small language and bugs are expected, so im not
blaming anyone for that and i reported it as an issue to the C3 github repo. But the outdated
examples and poor docs are a real issue, it made it harder than it shouldve been for me to figure
out how to use some parts of the language (i couldnt figure out how the LinkedList structure is
supposed to be used, so i just implemented my own for part 1). The language also seems a bit dirty
syntactically with the macros and stuff, but its whatever i guess. Atleast they have method syntax,
so chaining is nice (unlike in Hare). Maybe i will change my opinion in the next few days, for the
better or worse. Will see. So far it was ok.
As for the actual task of the day, part 1 was pretty easy. I first did a quick implementation using
a regular dynamic array (saved that implementation in part1.c3.bak), which was obviously slow, so
i wanted to switch to a linked list. But as i mentioned, i couldnt figure out how to use the linked
list provided by C3 properly, so i implemented my own and it works fine. Part 2 on the other hand
was really annoying. I immediately realised that the order of stones does not matter and that i need
to do something with that fact, but for some reason i just didnt think of a real solution. I knew i
had to group them together somehow, but i didnt think of how. I can use excuses, like being tired
today because of waking up at 5:00 and having school until 15:05, but maybe im just dumb. I looked
up hints for solving it, and i found people talking about the exact same grouping approach, but they
also mentioned memoizing it with a hash map. I realised how simple that was to come up with after
you figure out that you need to group the stones together, and so im disappointed in myself that i
did not come up with the solution. I guess its just because i dont do any memoization tasks at all,
so it wasnt the first thing to come to my mind. I should practice AOC-like problems outside of AOC
throughout the year from time to time to get better at this stuff and get more problem solving
experience.
To run part 1 or part 2, do:
$ make part1
$ make part2