One of the things that is sometimes frustrating in Rust is the inability to define a type that indicates some subset of enum variants. For example, it is very common to have a pattern like this:

match an_expr { expr_call(*) => process_call(an_expr) ... } fn process_call(a_call_expr: @ast::expr) { ... }

But as you can see, the type of a_call_expr does not reflect the fact that this expression is a call. This is frustrating.

Earlier thoughts

Patrick and I had earlier sketched out designs to rectify this loosely following Scala’s design for case classes. Graydon had an alternate design. There was a bit of back-and-forth in https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1679, though it doesn’t contain the latest details.

The idea consisted of two basic parts, one of which is “reused” in this new proposal and hence worth discussing in detail. This first part is that we “unify” the way that structs and enum variants are written, so that you can declare structs that wrap a tuple (like a variant) or variants with a field. Both have their place. So that means you could write a struct like this:

struct NodeId(uint)

which is effectively a newtype’d (in the Haskell sense) wrapper around a uint (this replaces the current, rather unintuitive, shorthand of enum foo = uint ). Or you could build an enum variant like this:

enum VarKind { LocalVar { id: uint, name: ~str } }

This addresses a common problem with variants: once they get beyond 1 or 2 parameters, it’s hard to know what’s what, and you end up with code like this:

def_upvar(node_id /* id of closed over var */, @def /* closed over def */, node_id /* expr node that creates the closure */, node_id /* id for the block/body of the closure expr */),

This would be much nicer if the fields could be labeled (of course, you could define a struct type and wrap it in the def_upvar , but that’s annoying in practice and rarely done).

The second part of the plan was to make each variant a type, and to permit the introduction of nested enums. This allowed for a simple tree-like scheme of refinements. We also intended to allow one to declare a set of common fields that are inherited by all variants. I’m not diving into much detail on this second patt of the plan because it is not important to my alternate proposal; however, suffice to say that while it was expressive, it carried some syntactic complications that we had never satisfactorily resolved.

An alternate approach

Anyway, after some discussion with Ben Blum, I’ve been thinking about another approach. It’s pretty close to what Graydon originally proposed (maybe even identical?) though with an added component from Patrick. Interestingly, they are both ideas that I didn’t like on first hearing them, but together they seem to appeal to me more.

Today an enum type is written Id<T*> . Under the new proposal, a full enum type would be written Id<T*>[VariantName*] . The meaning of this is “an instance of the enum Id<T*> which has the type of one of the variants listed”. There is a natural subtyping relationship: V1 <= V2 => Id[V1] <: Id[V2] (that is, if you have a more narrow type, you can use it where a wider type is expected).

To make this more concrete, here are some examples:

Option<int> --> as today Option<int>[Some,None] --> equivalent to the above Option<int>[Some] --> always Some @ast::Expr[Call] --> an expression that must be a call

I would expect user’s to define type aliases for common patterns. For example:

type Some<T> = Option<T>[Some]; type Lvalue = @ast::Expr[Call, ...];

When the variants are defined in a struct-like fashion, using named fields, users can access any field which appears as part of the common prefix to all variants (alternatively, we could support the access to any common field at all, but it would potentially be inefficient at runtime and I’d rather make that cost obvious to the user). So, if we define our expressions like so:

struct ExprBase { id: uint } struct BinaryArgs { lhs: @Expr, rhs: @Expr } enum Expr { Literal {base: ExprBase, value: uint}, Variable {base: ExprBase, name: ~str}, Plus {base: ExprBase, args: BinaryArgs}, Minus {base: ExprBase, args: BinaryArgs}, } type ExprBinop = Expr[Plus, Minus]

Then, given any expression, one could write expr.base.id . Given any ExprBinop , one could write expr.args.lhs . And so forth.

Although I was initially opposed to the common fields idea when Patrick proposed it, because it requires you to repeat yourself a bit more than I’d like, it overcomes some of the more annoying syntactic questions that plagued our earlier ideas. Moreover, I remember that in Scala, in practice I often ended up repeating common fields as part of the constructor:

sealed trait Expr(val id: Int) case class Literal(override val id: Int, value: Int) extends Expr(id) ...

This just formalizes the practice.

One important property of this proposal is that the narrowing of variants is achieved through a structural type and not a nominal type. That is, there is no nominal type corresponding to a “binop expression”; rather, it is defined through a type alias. This ensures that the Least Upper Bound and Greatest Lower Bound operations are easily defined, which is important for the type inferencer.

In conclusion…

The proposal is relatively easy to implement and doesn’t involve deep changes to any particular part of the language. It would give us a very expressive system for statically ruling out variants when possible that supports arbitrary subsets.