Comment by tison

FWIW, here is a general discussion about error handling in Rust and my comment to compare it with Go's/Java's flavor: https://github.com/apache/datasketches-rust/issues/27#issuec...

That said, I can live with "if err != nil", but every type has a zero value is quite a headache to handle: you would fight with nil, typed nil, and zero value.

For example, you need something like:

  type NullString struct {
   String string
   Valid  bool // Valid is true if String is not NULL
  }

.. to handle a nullable value while `Valid = false && String = something` is by defined invalid but .. quite hard to explain. (Go has no sum type in this aspect)