[lifthrasiir]

There is no fundamental way to simplify that further. If you omit angle brackets and use whitespaces instead then you will get a Haskell-like syntax which is even more horrible:

    Result (Either (ARef (INode T)) (inode::New T))

Maybe a single generic argument shouldn't need any parentheses. It would imply that `a b c` should be parsed as `a (b c)`, which is not super obvious due to the inverted order. ML instead swaps the entire order, so that `a b c` is sensibly `(a b) c` but here `b` and `c` would be base types. That yields the following:

    (T INode ARef, T inode::New) Either Result

I think this is indeed slightly better than the current Rust syntax, but any C developer will have hard time adjusting their brains to this order. This and the very existence of C++ prompted Rust to use the same syntax as C++ (the very early version used `A[B]` instead), but otherwise Rust types are much more predictable than C++ due to the lack of compile-time metaprogramming [1].

The fact that Haskell is not very different from Rust in the type syntax complexity shows that this type is just fundamentally "complex", because it is composed of multiple composable types. (I will personally avoid `Either` because I think an explicit enum is better here, but otherwise everything is independent from each other.) And an equivalent C function will do the same thing but without any type declaration and ad-hoc error code and/or convention, which never works well in practice.

[1] Some Rust crates do still attempt this, like the `typenum` crate, but I would not recommend them in general because they are really awkward to use.