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76 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
76 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
2 years ago
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---
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title: Advent of Wasm
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subtitle: Now with 87% more pain
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author: rose
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---
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So the last few years I have done Advent of Code off and on. Sometimes
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I have tried to learn a new language, other times I was just trying to
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beat my dad each evening. This year though, this year I don't know what
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I was thinking.
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It was several weeks after everyone else had started, I had largely written
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it off for the year - I was not up for it. Until a terrible idea crossed
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my mind.
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Like an intrusive thought, my mind asked: "Well you've been wanting to do
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something in web assembly for a while right? How bad could it be?"
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<br/>
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Turns out I was definitely not ready for this.
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## So what was so hard about it?
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More than anything else, I forgot how much you need to do by hand to do
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any sort of assembly. The first day saw me spending several hours just
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on some loader code to pass the puzzle input in from JS, call a wasm
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function, and then read back the result.
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Next was a few functions for reading numbers out of the wasm memory buffer,
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parsing them from ascii, etc. The core read loop was not too tricky, but
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the bit that took far longer than it had any reason to was converting my
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answer back to ascii and shoving it into an output area.
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Really none of it was surprising, and none of it <em><strong>*should*</strong></em> have
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been that hard ... it's just been a while since this Javascript girl
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has written truly low-level code.
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To make matters worse I got hard-core distracted by the non-wasm part of
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my wasm project. After the first day I returned to my stub JS loader and
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expanded it into a little wasm explorer.
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I added a code view, syntax highlighting, auto-loaded my puzzle inputs,
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even made a janky little dynamic list that would automatically pick up
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new days' solutions as I added them to the repo without needing me to
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touch the loader page each day.
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In the end I'm really quite proud of it, I will absolutely be reusing
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this setup for future years, and you should
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<a href="https://aoc2022.tempest.dev/" target="_blank">check it out</a>
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if you haven't already ... but for wanting to challenge myself with
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something new I was doing a lot of the same-old.
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Ultimately I got through 3 days before giving up jusst because every
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step along the way involved <em><strong>*so much*</strong></em> extra
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code. I may come back to some of the puzzles later, but for now I'm
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kind of happy with what I did, and I don't feel like I need to prove
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myself by doing more. I was doing it for fun, and so I stopped when
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it stopped being fun.
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## Tips if you want to get into writing wasm by hand?
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Uhh ... maybe consider don't?
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Jokes aside: do a throwaway project or two so you get used to passing
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data into and out of wasm, whatever parsing you're going to do, etc.
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Do everything in your power to make sure you can focus on the actual
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wasm part of your project, because (at least if you're anything like
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me) it's easy to get sidetracked with all that.
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With that said: I had fun. Doing new things is always a treat, so if
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you're looking for something new to try definitely consider giving
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webassembly a look.
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