Advent of code 2021

January 5th, 2022

This year, or rather last year, I decided to participate in the Advent of code. This post will explain why and how I decided to do it, but also reflect on my progress since it's well over now.

One of the great things about the Advent of code is that you can participate with whatever language you choose. So instead of coding in a language I'm comfortable with, I decided to go with C, for the following reasons:

• it's been 10+ years since I last programmed in C, and I wanted to dive back into it
• maybe I can learn some "modern" C features as I will be targeting C11
• I wanted to develop on OpenBSD and all the tools required for C development are included in the base OpenBSD install
• it's a good way to improve my skills with a terminal-based development environment: tmux, vim, make, gdb...
• C is very portable and it's always good fun to compile and run on Visual C++ 6.0 under Windows 98 with a 22 year old CPU

In the end, I mainly kept pace until day 8, at which point the puzzles started to take a little too much time (that I spent hunting some christmas presents...). You can find my code on my git repo. Though at that point I had (re)learnt a good deal about C, and was getting more comfortable at developing and debugging in text mode only. The code is not perfect and there are still some TODOs and shortcuts, especially regarding memory management. But the main point was to get the right result at the end.

As of today I'm still working on day 9 and maybe will continue to progress in the following weeks.