[swift-evolution] Adding Result to the Standard Library

[Guillaume Lessard]

I’m late to this particular party, but having just caught up with the thread I’m surprised that no one substantially addressed the stylistic duality that a `public enum Result` would bring.

In short, I’d rather Result be a struct than an enum.

I too implemented a Result, for obvious reasons. I was, however, unsatisfied that it added another interface for error handling, namely switching over the enum — it’s not really better, not really worse, but now there are more error handling patterns to look for in your code.

My solution was to simply switch to a `struct Result`, where the enum is private. The only way to get the value out is via a throwing method. See <https://gist.github.com/glessard/48f4c1305ac20b1b99c1bbdc2fb6290c> for a no-frills implementation.

This has all the advantages of the Result enum — it’s easily used in asynchronous situations and can implement the desired functional/monadic niceties, but without exposing an unnecessary alternate interface to Swift’s native error handling.

Cheers,
Guillaume Lessard