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Thank you for your input, I stand corrected. So as I understand it, it works somewhat like the result type of rust (or ocaml), or the haskell either type, but instead of being parameterized, it is extensible, isn't it?

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More like that, yes. Rust has two general-purpose mechanisms, generics and enums, which are combined to handle Optional and Result types. Zig special-cases optional types with `?type` (that is literally the type which can be a type or null), and special-cases errors with `!`. Particularly with errors, I find this more ergonomic, and easier to use. Exceptions were right about one thing: it does often make sense to handle errors a couple call frames up the stack, and Zig make that easy, but without the two awful things about exceptions: low-performance try blocks, and never quite knowing if something you call will throw one.

It also has tagged unions as a general mechanism for returning one of several enumerated values, while requiring the caller to exhaustively switch on all the possibilities to use the value. And it has comptime generics ^_^. But it doesn't use them to implement optionals or errors.

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