[plasticeagle]

Help me out here.

What is this empty type for? Could you provide an old man with a nice concrete example of this in action? I've used empty types in C++ to mark the end of recursive templates - which I used implement typelists before variadic templates were available.

But then you mention being unable to call functions which take an empty type as a parameter. At which point I cease to understand the purpose.

[tialaramex]

I don't know that I'll be able to convince you but I'll give a couple of examples.

What is the type of the expression "return x" ? Rust says that's ! pronounced Never, an empty type. This expression never had a value, control flow diverges.

So this means we can just use simple type arithmetic to decide that a branch which returns contributed nothing to the type of the expression - it has no possible value. This wasn't a special case, it's just type arithmetic.

Ok, lets introduce another. Rust has a suite of conversion traits. From, Into, TryFrom and TryInto. They're chained, so if I implement From<Goose> for Doodad, everybody gets the three other implied conversions. But the Try conversions are potentially fallible, hence the word Try. So they have an error type. Generic Code handling the Error type of potentially failing conversion will thus be written, even if in some cases the conversion undertaken chained back to my From<Goose> code. But wait, that conversation can't fail! Sure enough the chained TryFrom and TryInto produced will have the error type Infallible, which is an Empty Type.

So the compiler can trim all the error handling code, it depends upon this value which we know can't exist, therefore it never executes.