this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev! Other challenges are also welcome!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
Everybody Codes is another collection of programming puzzles with seasonal events.
EC 2025
AoC 2025
Solution Threads
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
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- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep all content related to advent of code in some way
- If what youre posting relates to a day, put in brackets the year and then day number in front of the post title (e.g. [2024 Day 10])
- When an event is running, keep solutions in the solution megathread to avoid the community getting spammed with posts
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console.log('Hello World')
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(Browser-based) Javascript
I got lazy for part 1 and stuffed the beam head's coordinates into a string instead of reusing my implementation that puts them into an int, gambling on part 1 not needing that extra bit of speed.
I did a similar mistake for part 2 as I did on day 6; I wrote a(n overkill) solution for keeping track of the entire path each beam/split follows - which involved cloning each array-storing-a-beam's-path at each split. Whereas on day 6 I got an "out of memory" error, this time I locked up my computer ๐ช ๐ฅ (Control+C doesn't exist in the browser console, and Control+W to close the tab wasn't getting through). Was very disappointed to realize we only need to keep track of the number of beams present at each position/index/abscissa without caring about which path they took to reach said index.
Code
Surprised you didn't trigger the OOM killer. Windows?
Naw, linux. I had a Youtube video running in the background that might have made the problem worse. I could switch desktops and move the mouse (albeit with a lot of lag and jitter) but not close the tab or even hard-close the browser.
Running the same code on my macbook triggered the "a script on this page is slowing down firefox, do you want to wait some more or pause and debug it?" prompt.
Either the OOM killer is not properly set up on my desktop, or it was actually a hot CPU loop that caused the lock-up and not memory pressure. Or some sort of hybrid cpu+mem problem? The code was cloning ever-longer arrays in a for-loop, and from my understanding the event loop for a browser page/tab is not only single-threaded but contains both UI events and script execution (unless you explicitly/specifically shell out to a web worker or the like).
Possibly using up swap space first?
This might be the actual culprit; I don't think I have any swap space allocated (
htopalways displays0/0for it). I have 48 gigs of RAM, and the "out of memory" error I got on a previous day's problem didn't provoke a single slowdown, freeze, or program crash...