UnitGenerator VS csharplang

You either have to do it manually or use a code generator (there are nugets for that, for example: https://github.com/Cysharp/UnitGenerator), but you absolutely can.

You might wanna take a look at https://github.com/Cysharp/UnitGenerator we've used it on some of our systems at work and works pretty well overall as Value Objects.

Here's the language proposal for those that are interested.

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/8928

C# has a much awaited and active proposal to add DUs to C# so I suspect C# will also support this once live (and continue its legacy of plucking great features from F#).

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/Typ...

We cannot blame Monads or ROP for this issue - it is a language limitation. In comparison, this is where a language like F# shines, as it allows us to define a discriminated union type that can carry multiple types of failures. Still, hope is possible - discriminated unions will eventually come to C#.

disjoint union vs union.

Scala3 is the only programming language to implement both AFAIK.

C# has a proposal to add both unions and disjoint unions: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/Typ...

OCaml has polymorphic variants which are open disjoint unions.

Kotlin is looking to add union types for errors: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-68296/Union-Types-fo...

I believe Java's checked exceptions behave somewhat like union types.

There is a runtime (not C#) feature that has been added that is relevant to the article: ref fields in structs. Before these, only certain runtime-blessed types like Span could contain refs directly.

In case anyone is interested, here is the spec about refs in structs and other lifetime features mentioned in the article:

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/csh...

And here is the big list of ways .NET differs from the publish ECMA spec. Some of these differences represent new runtime features.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/spec...

7 years ago: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/1060

3 years ago: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2021...

I've given up submitting to csharplang now. It seemed like a positive when it was first open-sourced, but the proposals/issues are often just circular discussions that go nowhere. It doesn't feel (at least from the outside) that any proposal by a non-MS employee would make it thru the process unless MS needed it themselves. Which is what I was alluding to in my original post.

I may well be wrong and maybe some proposals have made it through, but it feels like an illusion of community collaboration rather than actual community collaboration imho.

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/Typ...

This means we rely on switch expressions rather than a Match function with lambdas for each case. Unfortunately, unlike lambdas, switch expressions don't allow blocks of code. However, we can emulate them like this:

Type Unions for C#

Yeah I sometimes use them but they don’t cover all the cases. I’m waiting for roles/extensions to see if I can achieve a similar result.

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/5496