5 ms·

What differences do they lead to? I just find union types more flexible, with the perceived downside of losing some semantics on success/error results (but I do

• uzerfcwn 1y ago
  The core difference between sums and unions is that sum types have cardinality |A+B| = |A| + |B|, whereas union types have cardinality |A∪B| = |A| + |B| - |A∩B|. As you noted, type systems with union types, such as Typescript, also support sum types because you can create disjoint wrapper types (like Ok and Err) and their union type will be semantically equivalent to a sum type, since the intersection is an empty set. In this sense, union types are strictly more powerful than sum types. The downside is that union types require some notion of subtyping, since otherwise A∩B is always empty for distinct A and B. Unfortunately, subtyping is apparently very difficult to implement in HM-like type systems (like Rust and ML) such that it plays well with type inference.[0] Hence, the downside of having union types in a language is that users have to write out types more often. Unlike kibwen, I don't think Rust's type system is particularly essential for new languages. It's a design choice where one side has more powerful types but the other side has more powerful type inference. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner_type_system#Subtyping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner_type_sy...