Ok, so I lied: I'm not moving on to unions quite yet. Cyrus brought up a great point on the last post about .NET serialization, as well as the lack of thread safety in my third example. Due to the shared nature of singletons, I have to agree that thread...

In the beginning, there was... the singleton . Everything's got to start somewhere. Just like there's only one object type to “rule them all”, the singleton represents cases where there's only one. A pair of examples are the TextWriter...

Quick detour (not so much of a detour). Cyrus has challenged me to 48 hours in order to expound on how he could've written is IOptional<T> better. Actually, I started to explain some of my suggestions, but now he's imposed this limit , since...