Apparently they found a way to have the CPU know... about "this stuff".
I don't know what to tell you, but you're clearly not cut out to be a software developer in either machine code, assembly or C or any other language if you don't understand something this basic.
Sum types aren't the be all end all to all issues, for example you can not representer pointer values efficiently with sum types. Even rust does not wrap up pointers with sum types. Now try to go back 37 years to C89 and ask yourself if they were going to require compilers to have stringent checks like the rust compiler does.
The historical argument and appeal to assembly is illogical here. The only real argument is that niche value optimization is too complex or too clever for the time so even if sum types were in C, nullable pointers would still exist either way.
You're telling me OCaml / Rust / Haskell compile to fairy pixie dust? Obviously their compilers figured it out and it works.
If that was the goal, it failed horribly - the gatekeeping didn't work because the popularity exploded.
> You're telling me OCaml / Rust / Haskell compile to fairy pixie dust? Obviously their compilers figured it out and it works.
I said nothing of the sort.
