It may be possible to use the Any
trait to “launder” the value by first casting it to &Any
and then downcasting it to the generic type.
let any_value = match tmp_value {
serde_json::Value::Number(x) => x as &Any,
// ...
};
let maybe_value = any_value.downcast_ref::< T >();
I haven’t tested it, so I may have missed something.
Edit: to be clear, this will not actually let you return multiple types, but let the caller decide which type to expect. I assumed this was your goal.
Static types aside, the file system has a lot of failure cases, which every language is affected by, and Rust makes them very visible. This can indeed feel like a lot, but it’s an intentional feature and makes more sense in larger projects. I guess the feeling may get amplified by the author’s style of long form posts with a lot of details.
Error handling in practice contains a lot of “let the caller deal with it”, using the ?
operator to pass errors up the call stack. The more verbose options are for when you need to actually handle it.
I liked this talk on the subject: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2019/dan-abramov-the-wet-codebase
It’s a nice explanation of how it’s less about code that looks the same or currently performs the same operations, and more about what it means.
“Search prompt engineer”