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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

I usually do AoC in Common Lisp, but this year I'm giving Swift a chance.

It's not half bad at this kind of twiddling for being a statically typed mainstream language.

https://github.com/codr7/aoc24/tree/main/swift/Sources/aoc

This year is a tiny bit weird, I was just getting ramped up organizing the event at a new job; because I think it's very useful for devs to learn some real problem solving, as opposed to stitching frameworks.

And then I had to leave because my new boss turned out to be someone I couldn't imagine working with.

Guess it'll be just me and Emacs as usual.

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Excellent! Come and join the Swift leaderboard here https://forums.swift.org/t/advent-of-code-2024 if you haven't already -- it's super interesting to compare different solutions.

dont you find all the string parsing and manipulation to be quite painful in Swift? I tried to do AoC in Swift before and that put me off a lot. I liked doing little functional one liners but a week from now the parsing burden will be too high.

Nah, the String type is fine as far as basic functionality goes, I like adding my own convenience stuff in extensions.

The language has been moving pretty fast though, I have a feeling a lot of features I find useful are relatively new.

I program everyday in Swift. I attempted AoC for the first time in Swift last year and gave up after about a week or so for this exact reason and switched to python for the remainder. I don't want to struggle with the awkward string API to do things other languages can do in a line.

I'm curious, any specific examples you can remember?

I found the Scanner API (1) to be pretty handy for the more complex parsing in past years.

It’s Foundation so hopefully also on Linux/Windows, but if not there’s also one on GitHub called SwiftScanner.

1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/scanner

I enjoyed reading your solutions! I’m surprised how terse they are!

Lovely! I try to strive for readability first and foremost, which is a challenge in itself.

Are you writing the solutions / compiling / running all with Emacs? I wanted to try Swift this year as well but feels sort of silly spinning up XCode for this.

Yep, on Linux, or WSL to be exact, I just use the internal shell though.

You can use VSCode with a swift project created with the SwiftPackageManager (SPM). I find the experience to be good, with a good LSP support. I just have to sometimes trigger the build task for it to find newly defined objects.

That is if you have nothing against using VSCode.

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