Comment by tubthumper8
Comment by tubthumper8 2 days ago
There's also going to be quite a big ecosystem / standard library difference between languages that had fundamental type system features since the beginning vs. languages that added fundamental features 23 years later.
Imagine all the functions that might return one thing or another, which was inexpressible in C# (until this proposal is shipped), will all these functions release new versions to express what they couldn't express before? Will there be an ecosystem split between static typing and dynamic typing?
Having reviewed the proposal (of course no guarantee that's what discriminated unions (aka product types aka algebraic data types) will look like), and it appears that it very much integrates nicely with the language.
I don't suspect they'll make too many changes (if any) to the existing standard library itself, but rather will put functions into their own sub-namespace moving forward like they did with concurrent containers and the like.
Given their penchant for backwards compatibility, I think old code is safe. Will it create a schism? In some codebases, sure. Folks always want to eat the freshest meat. But if they do it in a non-obtrusive way, it could integrate nicely. It reminds me of tuples, which had a similar expansion of capabilities, but the integration went pretty well.