Learning about Rust Benchmarking with Sudoku from 5 minutes to 17 seconds

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Ferris enjoys solving puzzle also

I’ll take you through the process of optimizing a Sudoku solver written in Rust. We’ll start with a simple, unoptimized version and apply a series of optimizations that will take the time to solve 100,000 puzzles from over 5 minutes down to just 33 seconds, and 20,000 of the hardest puzzles from over 2 minutes down to just 17 seconds.

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The Setup

The project is a command-line Sudoku solver written in Rust. The puzzles are read from text files in the src/puzzle_banks directory, thanks to the github project Sudoku Exchange Puzzle Bank. Each line in these files represents a single puzzle in the following format:

The second part of the line is the puzzle itself, where 0 represents an empty cell.

The basic flow of the program is:

1. Read the puzzle file.
2. For each line, parse the puzzle string into a Board struct.
3. Call the solve function on the board.
4. Print the statistics.

The Benchmarks