Advent of Dusa, 2024 Edition

1 Dec 2024


Now that I’ve rewritten Dusa using the lessons I learned writing a paper about it over the last year, I get to do some fun exploring. Here’s a screenshot of a forest fire model that I implemented with p5js and Dusa:

A forest-fire cellular automata implemented in Dusa

(Incidentally, I’m incredibly grateful for Julia Evans’ timely discussion of the state of JavaScript libraries. Her post was intended for people that use JS libraries, but it was also very helpful in helping me sort out the way(s) in which the Dusa package should be distributed via NPM, and that helps the p5js sketch look like actual idiomatic p5js instead of needing weird exports and module stuff.)

But it’s also December, and that means another attempt to do Advent of Code in Dusa. I’m going to give myself a rating system to judge my examples this year:

Black stars ★ for solutions that works on the examples, that I think are conceptually sound, but that don’t work for the full example due to efficiency issues or some bug I don’t understand.

I’ll be updating this post over the month, but will mostly be doing commentary on solutions over on Mastodon.