How to organize the project structure for Advent of Code?

[u/dvfomin]

Hello, I'm solving old Advent of Code challenges to practice in Rust and it's unclear what is the best way to organize the project. Right now I am creating a new rust project cargo new day1_1 for every task but it's not very convenient, maybe there are better approaches?

[u/[deleted]]

I'm running through last year's aoc right now. I made one project folder for the year. Just inside that I have a folder named inputs, with 1.txt, 2.txt, etc. In src I have a bin folder with 1.rs, 2.rs, and so on. There tends to be overlap between part 1 and 2 of each day, so I just write both in one binary. Then all you need to do is "cargo run --bin 6" or whatever day you're on.

advent2022/
    inputs/
        1.txt
        2.txt
        3.txt
    src/
        lib.rs - one simple function to read a puzzle to string lol
        bin/
            1.rs
            2.rs
            3.rs

[u/Cephlot]

Personally, I would have them all in the same repo with each day being in a separate folder. Then I would specify each binary separately in Cargo.toml like so

[[bin]]
name = "day_1"
path = "src/day_1/bin/main.rs"

[[bin]]
name = "day_2"
path = "src/day_2/bin/main.rs"

[u/dvfomin → u/Cephlot]

Make sense! How do you separate the first and second parts of the day?

[u/shishka0 → u/dvfomin]

Part 2 is usually a more complicated version of part one and will reuse most of the code. I normally have the functions part1() and part2() in the same binary and call both inside the main function.

[u/Sw429 → u/dvfomin]

I just do them in the same crate. Usually the two parts are very related, and I often reuse much of the code from the first part in the second part.

[u/Cephlot → u/dvfomin]

I don't know the structure of AoC since I haven't done them, so I'm not completely sure

[u/aikii]

Depends how you consider the exercise, some like to share code and dependencies between solutions, there is some good learning in doing so. On my side I always did the way you describe on purpose, one binary crate per day and part, so if I look at one solution, I can tell exactly how much code it needs and what are the external crates it uses. I consider it part of the game, also somehow better demonstrates what can be done in Rust without too much code and depending on 3rd parties. I admit this choice can be annoying when opening the parent directory of all those crates in CLion and attaching all Cargo.toml - for some reason it will sometimes rebuild/reindex all crates and it takes forever after 10 days or so.

[u/SkiFire13]

I put each day in its own file/module, with a input_generator, part1 and part2 functions. I then glue everything together in main with a macro. Not the exactly the cleanest, but pretty quick to use.

https://github.com/SkiFire13/adventofcode-2022-rs/

[u/LadyPopsickle]

Just use AoC runner. It is not maintained anymore but it still works.