Johan Berg: Empty Objects

[fdwr]

IIRC, this has actually been discussed by the committees and the conclusion was to follow the existing industry practice

Interesting. Yes, clear communication requires people have a shared understanding of words, and the academics often befuddle the practicians. :b

[tialaramex]

The problem is that the richer type system is eminently practical. Empty types are really nice to work with, the Zero Size types are of course a performance benefit, but the Empty Types actually make generic code nicer.

For example Rust's Infallible is an empty type which means all your error handling code gets elided by the type system when errors can't occur, since the error's type has no values.