A Rusty Advent of Code

A detailed retrospective on solving Advent of Code 2018 challenges entirely in Rust. Highlights include using the packed-simd library for manual SIMD vectorization on Day 2 with community-driven optimization, leveraging rayon for effortless parallelism, using the nom parser combinator for recursive regex parsing, applying the cached crate for memoization, and using the Z3 SMT solver via Rust bindings to tackle an NP-hard nanobot optimization problem. The post showcases how Rust's ecosystem of crates and low-level capabilities shine in competitive programming contexts.