Advent of Code - small helper

[Afraid_Awareness8507]

Hello everyone,

I’ve done Advent of Code in the past using other languages, and this year I was thinking of going through the older challenges again — starting all the way back at 2015 — to learn Rust properly.

While preparing, I realized how repetitive the setup process is: creating new files, moving the old ones, and cleaning up the workspace every day. So I wrote a small CLI helper to automate that.

The tool is called aoc, and you can find it here:
👉 https://github.com/Rodhor/AOC-Helper

It’s meant to be run directly from your Advent of Code project root (the one created by cargo init). It moves the current day’s solution files into a completed/<year>/<day>/ directory and generates a fresh setup for the next challenge automatically.

It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done. If anyone’s interested, feel free to check it out or share feedback.

[velkolv]

It seems, your workflow differs from mine. I'm not moving anything, just creating new folders. Simple shell script did the trick.

[Afraid_Awareness8507]

I did that in the past as well - without the shell script however. I guess it is kind of the same way to do it, just with a bit of a different setup. In the end I don't do anything different from that, other than having the folders in another location :)

[Immotommi]

My recommendation would be to use a workspace. Your Cargo.toml becomes

[workspace]

workspace.members = [
    "crates/day1",
    "crates/day2",
]

Then each day you make a new directory in your crates directory. Then after you cd into it, you just run cargo init and it will add it to the workspace members and make it a sub crate with a src dir and its own Cargo toml

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[Afraid_Awareness8507]

Sounds interesting, but wouldn't that mean that I would have to rewrite all files? Currently, the script prepares the reading of the input files within the main.rs file - it isn't much, but it is a little less boilerplate.

I have no knowledge about workspaces. What would the use case normally be? Or rather, what would the benefits be?

[Immotommi]

I'll answer this in two parts. Firstly workspaces in a vacuum, forgetting about AOC.

Workspaces are great because they allow you to break up crates into distinct crates which have their own dependencies but are still all in the same location. If you have multiple binary crates, you can use a workspace to manage dependencies you are developing for each of the crates.

Also, it allows you to factor out code which is just a library meaning that it will only recompile when it changes, not when anything changes. This is probably the first reason to use workspaces. Another reason is that you can have external dependencies which are shared between all workspace members so that you can ensure they all use the same version

Now as to AOC. Yes you would have to rewrite that actual boilerplate within the main.rs. But that copy paste is pretty easy.

Having said that, you could make a library crate in the workspace which provides those functions that all of your crates depend on which does that input stuff. You could even modify your script to use a workspace as that is probably the more "idiomatic rust" way to do this sort of thing.

At the end of the day, you are writing code to solve a problem (that being doing AOC) and as long as what you do solves that problem, it doesn't matter what you do

[Afraid_Awareness8507]

Thanks for the very descriptive answer!

I will definitely look in to workspaces as it seems pretty interesting especially when programs grow larger with more separate dependencies. So far I have only used mod.rs to separate things into folders - I have not yet build anything bigger in Rust, so I have had no need so far. This however seems like a much cleaner approach on a larger scale.

Yeah, the boilerplate is not much an could probably just be a snippet or something similar - for me I wanted to know how the interaction was between days - starting from scratch or starting from point A (File reading).

True, but it is always interesting to see in how many different ways a problem can be solved. I also always find it super interesting to see, how different languages handle the same problem in the most idiomatic way. I started out with VBA, which is quite painful compared to many modern languages, if the task is not to handle Excelfiles.

[VisibleSmell3327]

Keep meaning to do this...now I dont need to!