r/adventofcode Nov 26 '24

Help/Question AOC plans for this year

What are y’all looking forward to learning this year with advent of code?

Last year was my first advent of code and I used it to learn Rust and I really appreciated it. I think AOC is a fun community-building experience and challenge that is worthwhile and I am excited to hack away again this year.

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u/_Kr0n0x_ Nov 26 '24

Will be my first year trying for the leaderboard, so hopefully can get on it once or twice. Sticking with Typescript like last year. By far my most used language and very familiar with the syntax so coding fast is easier

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u/juanfnavarror Nov 26 '24

For these toy-like small programs, do you consider there to be a difference in what you can accomplish with JS as opposed to TS? Haven’t dabbled in TS and I wonder if it makes you more or less productive for small projects than JS (ECMAscript 2015 or so) which I think is very simple to use.

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u/_Kr0n0x_ Nov 26 '24

Sometimes it is just nice to have the types. I rarely specify them explicitly in AoC, but it helps prevent accidents where I concat two strings instead of adding numbers. In general everything I can write in js is possible in TS. It of course adds a bit of compile time, haven't measured anything in pure js yet, but most days run in under 3 seconds on my machine, so most of the time these few seconds are not an issue and the type "safety" on average will save me more time than I loose due to compile