Thanks for the clarification. This article also helped. http://talesofcpp.fusionfenix.com/post-21/rant-on-the-stdexperimentalvariant-to-come http://talesofcpp.f

Thanks for the clarification. This article also helped. http://talesofcpp.fusionfenix.com/post-21/rant-on-the-stdexperimentalvariant-to-come http://talesofcpp.fusionfenix.com/post-21/rant-on-the-stdexp... In it's terminology, std::variant is a 'discriminated union' instead of a 'sum type'. Making std::variant the latter would also have had disadvantages it seems.