Dart

Terrible monkey-coding approach of banging strings together and counting the resulting shards. Just kept to a reasonable 300ms runtime by a bit of memoisation of results. I’m sure this can all be replaced by a single line of clever combinatorial wizardry.

var __countMatches = {};
int _countMatches(String pattern, List counts) =>
    __countMatches.putIfAbsent(
        pattern + counts.toString(), () => countMatches(pattern, counts));

int countMatches(String pattern, List counts) {
  if (!pattern.contains('#') && counts.isEmpty) return 1;
  if (pattern.startsWith('..')) return _countMatches(pattern.skip(1), counts);
  if (pattern == '.' || counts.isEmpty) return 0;

  var thisShape = counts.first;
  var minSpaceForRest =
      counts.length == 1 ? 0 : counts.skip(1).sum + counts.skip(1).length + 1;
  var lastStart = pattern.length - minSpaceForRest - thisShape;
  if (lastStart < 1) return 0;

  var total = 0;
  for (var start in 1.to(lastStart + 1)) {
    // Skipped a required spring. Bad, and will be for all successors.
    if (pattern.take(start).contains('#')) break;
    // Includes a required separator. Also bad.
    if (pattern.skip(start).take(thisShape).contains('.')) continue;
    var rest = pattern.skip(start + thisShape);
    if (rest.startsWith('#')) continue;
    // force '.' or '?' to be '.' and count matches.
    total += _countMatches('.${rest.skip(1)}', counts.skip(1).toList());
  }
  return total;
}

solve(List lines, {stretch = 1}) {
  var ret = [];
  for (var line in lines) {
    var ps = line.split(' ');
    var pattern = List.filled(stretch, ps.first).join('?');
    var counts = List.filled(stretch, ps.last)
        .join(',')
        .split(',')
        .map(int.parse)
        .toList();
     ret.add(countMatches('.$pattern.', counts)); // top and tail.
  }
  return ret.sum;
}

part1(List lines) => solve(lines);

part2(List lines) => solve(lines, stretch: 5);