Arity specialized branching constructs

[Munksgaard]

This is an experiment that introduces arity specialized branching constructs. It's not meant to be immediately merged, but to serve as a discussion point regarding this alternative library design, and whether it's something we might want.

The idea is to add multiple specialized Offer/Choose constructs according to arity. That way, instead of chaining lots of Offer's and having to do sel2().sel2().sel2(), we'd simply have an OfferN with associated sel1(), sel2(), ..., and selN() methods.

So far I've only introduced Offer3 and Choose3 structs, but they serve to give us an idea of how the library would end up looking.

Edit: Almost all of the tests and examples will be failing right now, but that's to be expected. Consult the ATM example (examples/atm.rs) to see how it looks from a users perspective.

[Munksgaard]

We'd definitely want some macros to actually define the different constructs and methods instead of doing it manually.

[Munksgaard]

Pros:

• More user friendly. The user doesn't need huge nested Offer's and Choose's.
• Performance. When choosing between n (n < 256) branches, we only have to send one byte, instead of O(log n) bytes or O(n) bytes.

Cons:

• Less user friendly. The user has to keep track of many different branching constructs. For example, not only does he need to choose between Offer2, Offer3 and so on, but when matching against an offer() call, the matches explicitly mention the arity of the offer call. For example, if c is an Offer3 branch, something like the following is necessary:

match c.offer() {
    Branch3::B1(c) => ...
    Branch3::B2(c) => ...
    Branch3::B3(c) => ...
}
...

If you later change the arity of the branch you have to actually change all of these Branch3s to Branch4s, for example.

• Library bloat. The library becomes a lot bigger. We can use macros that declare the structs and methods for us to help alleviate this.

[Manishearth]

I wonder if we can make this work with tuples?

[Munksgaard]

Good idea, @Manishearth! Check out c936af4. We still need the BranchN structs as far as I can tell, but we get rid of the multitude of OfferN structs.

[Manishearth]

We could just impl Dual on all the tuple types with a macro, and then the rest should follow on generic Offer<T> and Choose<T> structs.

[Manishearth]

Oh, but the enums need to be made no matter what. In that case we shouldn't complicate it with tuples and just macro all the things I guess. The macro for this is pretty simple afaict.

[Munksgaard]

I actually think I prefer the tupled version over the OfferN version regardless.

[Manishearth]

SGTM. We can always make OfferN typedefs anyway.