Advent of Cigg

This year, I decided I was going to smoke the competition. 🚬🚬

Context

Cigg is a language that I wrote from scratch. To prove that it is (slightly) more than a prototype, I decided to solve all of this year's Advent of Code problems using it.

It is not the fastest language, and it obviously does not offer luxuries such as a debugger or an LSP. But it does have some fairly neat and convenient syntax, as illustrated by this snippet from the day 5 solution:

let ranges = sort map (range => map int words "-" range) words "\n" parts[0];

Language bugs

Solving AoC in a language that you wrote yourself is actually twice as much fun as doing it in a normal language. Now, if you encounter a bug while solving a problem, the bug could actually be in the language, not your code!

Here are some of the fun bugs I encountered, along with the commits that fixed them:

• Day 2: I used i64 for my ranges, right? fix
• Day 2: Break statements are simple. Surely I didn't forget to clean up the stack. fix
• Day 3: Call frames and lexical scopes are not the same thing. I knew that. fix
• Day 6: Why is my brand new empty string not empty? fix

Running the solutions

You can run the solutions using the steps outlined below.

I have not included the scripts as git-tracked files since I do not want GitHub to label the repo with another language. It would be embarrassing to claim that I solved all problems using my own language, only for GitHub to display "Python: 100%".

1. Download inputs

First, get your AOC_SESSION token from chrome devtools and export it:

export AOC_SESSION=a53....

Then, run this Python code to download your personal inputs:

from aocd import get_data
import os
import time

if not os.path.exists('inputs'):
    os.makedirs('inputs')

for day in range(1, 13):
    if not os.path.exists(f'inputs/day{day}.in'):
        with open(f'inputs/day{day}.in', 'w') as f:
            # avoid rate limit and be a good citizen :)
            time.sleep(1)
            f.write(get_data(day=day, year=2025))
            print(f"Day {day} input saved.")

2. Install Cigg

Install Cigg by following the instructions in the language repository.

3. Run and benchmark all the solutions

Finally, you can run all the solutions using the following (obviously Claude-generated) script:

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
total=0
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12; do
  echo "== $i.cigg =="
  t=$(
    /usr/bin/time -p cigg "$i.cigg" 2>&1 1>&3 3>&- \
      | awk '/^real /{print $2}'
  ) 3>&1
  echo "Time: ${t}s"
  total=$(awk -v a="$total" -v b="$t" 'BEGIN{printf "%.2f", a+b}')
done
echo ""
echo "total $total"