[benschulz]

Can you expand on that? As long as the public type is opaque I don't see what there is to regret.

[zaarn]

As someone with difficulties telling left and right apart, using Either isn't particularly straight forward. This plus the left and right variant become meaningless on their own.

Ie, if I wanted an enum of either a string or an integer, it becomes "Either<&str, i64>".

But what I wanted is that it's either a string identifier or the database Id of something to be later referenced, which might be better described as "enum IdentOrDbId { Ident(String), DbId(i64) }".

This is of course a much simplified example of things I've faced.

[benschulz]

Sorry, based on the replies I'm getting I did not make myself clear. I only want to use Either in cases like the following.

    fn some_func() -> impl SomeTrait {
        if some_condition {
            Either::Left(a)
        } else {
            Either::Right(b)
        }
    }

Both a and b will implement SomeTrait which is all callers care about. However, because they're structurally different they must be wrapped in an Either that delegates all methods from SomeTrait to a or b respectively.

[the_mitsuhiko]

The moment you have an Either::Left(Either::Left(x)) you're starting to revisit everything. Yet that's what happens with impl Iterator a lot when you have branches.