Hiking for Advent of Code 2024 - Day 10

Day 10 of Advent of Code is a simple hike up a mountain. This visualization is just a representation of the searching algorithm, so a few more spaces are filled in that what represents a hiking trail.

Hiking

Lessons Learned

For the past couple of years, I always used SIMD4<Float> to represent a color, since that is what is directly used by Metal. That’s always tricky because it’s hard to eyeball what color something is when looking at SIMD4<Float>(0.25, 0.75, 0.01, 1.0).

I added an extension for using native colors directly, so I can instead ask for NativeColor.systemGreen.simd. Under the hood, NativeColor is just and alias for UIColor or NSColor.