[jdefr89]

What is with people and their need for enums? Functionally using go const with iota gives you the same damn thing and people use enums that way 99% of the time. I find Rusts reliance on enums annoying as hell. At this point I consider Rust a bandwagon language. The syntax is abysmal and we have had memory safe languages far before Rust. That I wont get into because as a Vulnerability Researcher I find the Rust push super misguided and it sets me off.

[eximius]

To be more clear, I want sum types with exhaustive matching - which Go does not support.

I get by without it Go enums are an inferior representation of the same logical concepts. Sure, I can have (kind, value) and cast things for a hacky sum type for some kind enum. But Go lacks closed enums/exhaustive matching.

You can at least validate the match arms with things like type switches and marker interfaces, but they're still not exhaustive and they're terribly verbose.

And, again, I can get by without them! But I miss them because Rust-style enum representation comes up _so often_, even if you don't like the rest of Rust.

[steveklabnik]

> What is with people and their need for enums?

I mean, you have atomic and compound data types. Atomic ones represent single values, like "a string" or "an integer", and compound ones represent multiple atomic types combined in some way, like a struct or an enum. Enums are useful for the same reason structs are useful, they do the same core thing, just model it in a different way. It's the difference between "and" and "or", which are both useful tools.