Union Types and Option Types (2025)
tibleiz.net
tibleiz.net
Like, what do you mean you can’t have three union members? And that the order of the union matters? These are some of the most useful properties of union types, and the arguments for what Copper did are weak sauce.
And set unions are supposed to be unordered anyway. You're going against what everyone expects from other languages and basic math.
Unless, you do de-serialization and serialization in tight-loop I guess is it acceptable.
NOTE: A bigger problem is when you need to decide at runtime which one of the kind you have been handled.
It's a bit like putting the length of an array at the end rather than the beginning though - you need to know its size first to know the offset.
The value of a tagged union may be like a flexible array member - in that the size of the value depends on the tag. We shouldn't need to allocate the maximum possible variant's space when most of the instances may be the smallest. Unlike a C `union`, which are a fixed size, a tagged union has no such requirement - it can be dynamically sized depending on tag.
The only time you can get away with only allocating the 'real' size is if you're sticking it in its own separte memory allocation and using a pointer to refer to it in the aforementioned contexts. Which, to be fair, is a sensible thing to do if BigThing is very big, as opposed to just 'on the bigger end of sane struct sizes'.
To clarify I'm talking about what you'd do in a language implementation where the actual memory layout is opaque to userspace and bit twiddling optimizations aren't making things harder to understand for everything, not what you'd do when writing handwritten C code or an api where you expect people to access the memory directly. This isn't unheard of - e.g. from my research Swift does it, some C++ stdlib implementations do it.
(Related - the rest of the bag of weird tricks that Rust and Swift and presumably other languages use to optimize enum/union layout are pretty interesting - the tag bits actually take up no extra space in many cases).
public sealed abstract class Option<T> {
private Option() { }
public sealed class Some<T> : Option<T> {
private readonly T value;
public Some(T value) {
this.value = value;
}
}
public sealed class None<T> : Option<T> {
public None() { }
}
public static Option<T> Some(T value) { return new Some(T); }
static readonly Option<T> _None = new None();
public static Option<T> None() { return _None; }
}
The sizeof(None) is not the same as sizeof(Some<T>) - the Some class has an additional field not present in the None class - and the size of Some depends on the type parameter T.
If the objects have RTTI, we don't even need a tag field, as there is an implicit tag in the form of type information in the object - the pattern matching facility can test `opt is Some<T>` or `opt is None`.
In C we would have to use a pointer to option to do the equivalent, eg with some GCC extensions we can do:
enum option_tag { OPT_NONE, OPT_SOME };
typedef struct option { enum_option_tag tag; } *Option;
struct none { struct option base; } _none = { .base.tag = OPT_NONE };
Option None = (Option)&_none;
#define Some(T, _value) \
({ \
struct some_##T { \
struct option base; \
T value; \
} *result = GC_alloc(sizeof(struct some_##T)); \
result->base.tag = OPT_SOME; \
result->value = (_value); \
(struct option*)result; \
})
bool is_some(Option opt) {
return opt->tag == OPT_SOME;
}
bool is_none(Option opt) {
return opt->tag == OPT_NONE;
}
#define _get_some(T, opt) (((struct some_##T*)(opt))->value)
Not the most efficient way to implement an Option in C, but for other tagged unions, if any of the values are particularly large this may be beneficial.
That's why I do such things in my language in a different way. Optional and union types are just library container classes. More methods may be added if necessary, internal layout may be changed, etc. without changing the language core itself. But in such an approach the language itself should provide necessary means allowing creation of such library abstractions.
var value = maybeValue.notNil // I know what I'm doing