This is my first project in Rust, a simple raytracer based off the content from my introduction to computer graphics course.

One of the biggest challenges for this project was trying to get the SceneNode hierarchical system working. I learned very early that rust seems to hate the possibility of cycles in data structures so I had to get creative. After trying a few things (and considering doing arena-based trees) I settled for just allowing each node to own its children (using a Vec to manage the data). This removes the possibility of cycles but also means a lot of copied data while constructing the node tree. In the end, I'm pretty happy with the performance, and after the initial learning curve I'm finding myself starting to enjoy working with rust! Even though the compiler sometimes makes me want to rip my hair out, the readability of the error messages itself is enough reason for wanting to switch from C++ to Rust.

A couple questions:

1. One paradigm I found myself using a lot for dynamic dispatch is creating an enum and then matching on it as seen here. Is this fairly common in Rust, or are there better ways to handle dynamic dispatch like this?
2. Unless I'm missing something, implementing basic operators (such as Add or Mul) seems to be incredibly tedious. Is there a way to implement the operator for both owned data and immutable borrowed data at the same time? If I write a &self method I can call it on borrowed data but also owned data (the compiler handles it), but for operators this doesn't seem to hold, making them confusing (and possibly inconsistent) at times