On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Anthony Tavener <anthony.tavener@gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Dmitry Grebeniuk <gdsfh1@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>>   Why will anyone ever need more than 200 constructors of a sum type?
>> (also note the presence of polymorphic variant types.)
>>
>>
> Back when I read about the limit on constructors I had a moment of worry.
> Thankfully the limit is only on non-constant constructors.
>
> I currently have a variant with 292 constructors, but only 30 are
> non-constant.
> These represent optional characteristics a character may have in a game,
> some
> with additional payload. I could imagine all of them having their own
> payload,
> but of course there are other options, like polymorphic variants, or
> encoding these
> purely as data rather than types.
>
> I wanted to share that as a "be careful of what seems impossible from your
> perspective". ;)
>

Right. Constant constructors are represented as integers and require no
header, so they're very cheap. And polymorphic variants use more memory, so
they're not a great option. Having the flexibility for more constructors is
a good thing.

Yotam