A tagged union
Sometime you have some data that can be of type A or B. Very common use cases include decoding various file format or network protocols, communicate with memory mapped devices, some processing that can return an A or a B depending on its result, and many more.
To resolve that issue, it is common to use a union. A union is a aggregate where all members share the same memory. It is very handy, but use it wrongly and you end up badly messing up your memory. I’ll demonstrate in this article how to make this safe in D.