Comment by kibwen
10 hours ago
> Is it obvious to rust developers that "!" would be the never type?
Prior to this change most Rust developers would never have cause to ever use `!` for any reason. The only stable way to do so would be to specify the quote-unquote "return type" of divergent functions, which Rust has supported via this special-cased syntax since prehistoric days, before even Mozilla got involved. You can see it in the oldest capture of the tutorial from Jan 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120109041112/http://www.rust-l...
So when it came time to elevate `!` from being a special-cased return type to being a fully-fledged type, it was only natural to reuse this syntax. However, I tend to agree that, because we call it "the never type" in casual conversation, the most natural thing to do would be to just have a type alias called `Never` that we could encourage people to use instead. But that would be a perfectly backwards-compatible change that could be made at any point (as proven by the fact that the stopgap and long-stable `Infallible` type is becoming just such a type).
> Prior to this change most Rust developers would never have cause to ever use `!` for any reason.
As a type.
"!" is in the most basic example nearly every rust developer has seen:
Unless you specifically watched a presentation or read a blog post about the never type, you probably haven't seen it as a type.
If the average (and nearly all new) rust developers encounters "fn bla(blub: i64) -> !" I suspect they will mostly go "huh??" (or wonder what kind of weird macro that is) until it becomes common to encounter early and gets it's own early entry in the rust book.
Compared to reading "fn blub(bla: &str) -> Never", which seems rather straight forward imo. However, "Never" might be the name of some actual Struct or Enum in various codebases.