December is the month of Advent of Code. I had told myself not to participate this year because I know I get completely consumed by the problems and it has a negative impact on the rest of my life. It worked. Until December 15th. More on that later.

Code Editor Update

Last month I started working on a new code editor. It is a mix of a text editor and a structured editor. It is all text, but parsers and pretty printers allow you to work with a tree structure and not think too much about syntax.

I continued working on it this month. The big achievement was that I added support for another language in addition to JSON. The other language is rlmeta. Here is a screenshot showing the parser opened in the editor:

A screenshot of releditor editing the parser of rlmeta.

This is a big achievement because it ties everything together. You define a parser and a pretty printer for your language. That gives you all editing capabilities. However, you can also write a code generator, and now you have a full blown programming language with editing support “for free”. This potentially provides an environment to quickly experiment with new programming languages.

Conceptually, I’m quite happy with this achievement. However, there are many things to work on before this is “production ready”. First of all, the performance is pretty horrible because of the constant parsing and pretty printing. Second of all, I need to see if a tree based editor can actually become better than a regular text editor.

Advent of Code

I couldn’t help myself but to participate this year as well. The experience was not as stressful as last year. I still got consumed by the problems, but the feeling was mostly positive. I managed to complete all but 3 problems. Right now, the interest to complete them is pretty low. I might take a look at other solutions to see if I can learn something from that.

My approach to solving the problems is that I try to solve them in order, and I don’t look at others' solutions until I have solved both parts. However, I’m out of ideas to try on the last problems, and I think the competition part is over by now. I might learn something for next year if I look at solutions now.

This year I also practiced object oriented design. So my solutions involve many small objects interacting with each other to produce a solution. It was mostly a success I think. One of my favorite solutions is for day 11.

This year I also think that I got the hang of Dijkstra and A*. (I found Introduction to the A* Algorithm from Red Blob Games really helpful.)

You can find all my solutions on GitHub.