This is a nice summary of the practical aspects and considerations. It isn’t something anyone should be doing explicitly on a regular basis but there are occasi

This is a nice summary of the practical aspects and considerations. It isn’t something anyone should be doing explicitly on a regular basis but there are occasions, particularly in libraries, where it is the perfect tool for the job. There is also the inverse use case: smuggling pointers inside status codes, enums, and similar. For example, optionally encoding a pointer to additional error metadata for non-zero result codes. In C++ it isn’t that uncommon to also see Result types implemented similarly when the type allows it.