In my previous article, I said I needed to stop thinking of Rust generics as Java generics, because in Rust, generic types are erased.

Someone gently pointed out that they are also erased in Java, the difference was elsewhere. And so, let's learn the difference together.

I learned Java first (a long, long time ago), and their approach to generics made sense to me at the time.

I've been looking for this blog post everywhere, but it doesn't exist, so I guess it's my turn to write about Some Fun with Rust.

Let's say you have a recursive, acyclic data structure, like so:

struct Node {
    values: Vec<i32>,
    children: Vec<Node>,
}

This allows you to represent a tree-like structure: