Any interest in a Type Disjunction (Union Types) SIP?

[Benjamin Jackman]

I was wondering if anyone has interest in or had thoughts on

a Scala compiler & Scala library supported version of Unions Types.

For me, the lack of union types keeps cropping up as source of a lot of boilerplate. 

I am currently on a new project at work where Unions would be quite useful. Right 

now we use a sealed trait + case classes pattern to encode them. This has the nice

property of having the compiler generate exhaustive checks in match expressions.

This Stack Overflow post list several different methods different members of the community have gone

about attacking Scala's lack of native union type:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3508077/does-scala-have-type-disjunction-union-types?rq=1

I understand Scala is intended to be a scala-ble language and enabling users to create powerful

constructs like this on their own is one of the goals of the language. However reading over the Futures SIP got 

me to thinking that part of the motivations for having Futures directly in the standard library was to have a 

consistent version across the Scala ecosystem. I think that motivation could be applied here as well and with 

similar benefits.

I also remember Martin mentioning that union types would eventually be added to the language, but my google-fu

is lacking and I can't dig up the quote. I haven't been keeping up with the mailing list for a while so I am not

sure if this is still the view held by Martin / others in the community.

Benjamin Jackman

[Simon Ochsenreither]

Without having any decision-making capabilities, my gut feeling is that union and Intersection types will arrive sooner or later.

They are featured quite prominently in DOT, Scala's "upcoming" type system formalization, so you maybe want to look into that for more information: https://github.com/namin/dot

Here was an interesting thread on the mailing list, which approached union/intersection types more from a developer's perspective of "what do I want to have out of it?": https://groups.google.com/d/topic/scala-language/J8LpYDmrOCg/discussion

[Prashant Sharma]

is DOT any close to coming to scala ? I was in an impression, it is still in its initial phase. 

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Prashant

[Lukas Rytz]

DOT is indees in early stages, not close to coming to Scala. It is a research project to explore a new foundation for a Scala-like type system.

[kkli...@gmail.com]

Union and intersection types are the features that would save me the most code/pain.

[Suminda Dharmasena]

Biggest selling point in my point of OCaml and F# is Type Unions. 

Type unions will introduce non inheritance based typing hierarchy. E.g. https://blogs.janestreet.com/a-and-a/.

[Tomer Ben David]

definitely, I would love to see support for Union Types! Life are so much
difficult without it!

[Ruslan Shevchenko]

+1

[Леонид Горшков]

+1. For eeexamle, It can be very useful for fluent builder interfaces for exclude called methods