Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
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Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
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Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#2I always hated the name. You're not enumerating anything. You are picking a variant, encoding a choice. Maybe "sum type" is too "monad", but surely "variant record" or even "variant" would have been a better name.
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#3> A commonly said piece of feedback from someone who's learning Rust as a second language tends to be that enums are far better supported in Rust than any other language.
This is nonsense. I doubt that this is common feedback and it is just not correct that it is far better supported in Rust than in any other language. Why would anyone say that? Rust pretty much has support for ADTs, sum types and product types. Just like any modern (functional) language has.
Haskell, Scala, F#, OCaml, etc.
(And I love rust, write it in my day-to-day as well as on my spare time.)
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#4I always hated the name. You're not enumerating anything. You are picking a variant, encoding a choice. Maybe "sum type" is too "monad", but surely "variant record" or even "variant" would have been a better name.
While I agree with you, I can understand going with enum so that they don't scare away the C and C++ crowd with being too fartsy with theoretic stuff.
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#5> A commonly said piece of feedback from someone who's learning Rust as a second language tends to be that enums are far better supported in Rust than any other language. This is nonsense. I doubt that this is common feedback and it is just not correct that it is far better supported in Rust than in any other language. Why would anyone say that? Rust pretty much has support for ADTs, sum types and product types. Just…
Because many people start learning in one of the industry incumbent, not necessarily good by design languages.
Java, C, C++, python, Javascript, go...
As a second language is a quite different selector than after education in language design or excursions to functional programming.
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#6> A commonly said piece of feedback from someone who's learning Rust as a second language tends to be that enums are far better supported in Rust than any other language. This is nonsense. I doubt that this is common feedback and it is just not correct that it is far better supported in Rust than in any other language. Why would anyone say that? Rust pretty much has support for ADTs, sum types and product types. Just…
There is a group of folks that had learnt these features via Rust, and for whatever reason always praise Rust for "inventing" them.
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#7> A commonly said piece of feedback from someone who's learning Rust as a second language tends to be that enums are far better supported in Rust than any other language. This is nonsense. I doubt that this is common feedback and it is just not correct that it is far better supported in Rust than in any other language. Why would anyone say that? Rust pretty much has support for ADTs, sum types and product types. Just…
Because many people start learning in one of the industry incumbent, not necessarily good by design languages. Java, C, C++, python, Javascript, go... As a second language is a quite different selector than after education in language design or excursions to functional programming.
Java enums are also quite powerful versus what C, C++ and C# can do.
They are real objects, can have associated data and methods.
So if they are surprised by Rust, haven't learnt Java properly
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#8I always hated the name. You're not enumerating anything. You are picking a variant, encoding a choice. Maybe "sum type" is too "monad", but surely "variant record" or even "variant" would have been a better name.
In early Rust, the keyword was `tag`. In order to improve familiarity with C++ programmers, bikeshedding raged between `enum` and `union` for years before finally landing on the former.
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because many people start learning in one of the industry incumbent, not necessarily good by design languages. Java, C, C++, python, Javascript, go... As a second language is a quite different selector than after education in language design or excursions to functional programming.
Java enums are also quite powerful versus what C, C++ and C# can do. They are real objects, can have associated data and methods. So if they are surprised by Rust, haven't learnt Java properly
I Haven't used java in ages.
Though from a quick search, it's still just scalar/unary values. Rhough one of the better implementations of those.
But the big advantage of the more sum type Style enums rust provides is the ability to nest values in them while preserving type safety guarantees. So I still see them as miles better as a language concept.
Re: Enums in Rust – and why they feel better
#10I always hated the name. You're not enumerating anything. You are picking a variant, encoding a choice. Maybe "sum type" is too "monad", but surely "variant record" or even "variant" would have been a better name.
While I agree with you, I can understand going with enum so that they don't scare away the C and C++ crowd with being too fartsy with theoretic stuff.
they scared me away when I tried to do from/to u32 and comparing them, etc.