Officially one year on Rust

Not going to go on a long-winded rant about all the things I love about Rust because I'd be preaching to the choir; instead I just want to say that as a programmer whose day job involves working with languages like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and Go on occasion, Rust definitely challenged me in that it made me question on an egregious amount of occasions whether I was even good at programming. Case in point: my first few Rust programs were incredibly painful—they were basically death bouts between me and the compiler—but I knew there was something special about Rust that made it so highly-regarded so I decided to stick to it to see if I could eventually see it. That was probably the best decision I've made as a programmer because Rust has fundamentally changed the way I think and therefore how my programs are written. Rust has taught this high-level programmer to think so much more critically about how I'm handling my memory across any language; and strings to me will never be the same. But even a year in, I still have so much more to learn. Traits literally just clicked for me a month ago, and I still barely understand how and when to properly annotate my lifetimes.

In any-case, I remember back when I thought I wasn't going to make it to month 3 in my Rust journey, but here I am a year later, a much better programmer. To commemorate a year on Rust I decided to make this little program, Erdtree, based on the ancient tree program, using nothing but the standard library to put my Rust skills to the test. Happy to take as much feedback as I can!

With that said, cheers to Rust, and cheers to many more years on Rust <3

Edit: Hyperlinks