Unfortunately for me, all of my C/C++ is in the embedded space (by that I mean, I am thrilled to do embedded programming. but it's C), so a lot of the nicer fea

Unfortunately for me, all of my C/C++ is in the embedded space (by that I mean, I am thrilled to do embedded programming. but it's C), so a lot of the nicer features of C++ either aren't available to me (unsupported by the compiler), or are too expensive to use (dynamic dispatch, exceptions). Your Option implementation is definitely interesting; I may crib it some day. Half my consternation comes from an itchy feeling of "why am I inventing this, when Rust already does it!" that perpetually nags at me. It's entirely a hangup that I make myself get over, but it's still there.