Advent of Rust Day 6 - The power of iterators

06 Dec 2017

This is a series where I’ll be discussing interesting Rust tidbits that I encounter when solving Advent of Code 2017.

You can find the complete (spoiler) solution here: udoprog/rust-advent-of-code-2017

On day 6 we need to iterate over a vector, by starting at an index in the middle of the vector and wrap around.

A neat way to accomplish this, is to use range expressions (like 0..10) as an iterator, and split it into two parts.

let mut v = vec![0, 0, 0, 0];
let idx = 2;

for (i, idx) in (idx..v.len()).chain(0usize..idx).enumerate() {
    v[idx] += i;
}

println!("out = {:?}", v);

This would print:

out = [2, 3, 0, 1]