> the "obviously" wrong option But it's not, hence the aforementioned bikeshedding. When Rust enum variants have data, they're like C unions with automatically

> the "obviously" wrong option But it's not, hence the aforementioned bikeshedding. When Rust enum variants have data, they're like C unions with automatically-inserted tag checking. When Rust enums don't have data, they're like C enums (they're literally how you do FFI interop with enums in C, which should demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that `enum` isn't categorically wrong). They have the properties of both depending on how they're defined, but at the end of the day they technically have more in common with C enums than C unions (which is why Rust also has `union` for doing C FFI). > to get C++ programmers on board, wouldn't the obvious name not be "variant"? Most early Rust contributors were also C++ programmers (due to Mozilla), and I don't recall a single person ever suggesting `variant` as the keyword. I suspect people here are overestimating the mindshare of boost::variant as of 2014.