TIL that it was named phantom types. I use them in C via struct/union. It is a little more verbose to use, but offers type safety when needed without any runti

TIL that it was named phantom types. I use them in C via struct/union. It is a little more verbose to use, but offers type safety when needed without any runtime penalty. That, and a good naming scheme : always encode the unit in the variable name. Always. timeout_ms is much better than timeout, unless timeout is a human readable string. Same for any config file parameter.