Rust now supports unions:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
union MyUnion {
    f1: u32,
    f2: f32,
}
#}

Unions are kind of like enums, but they are “untagged”. Enums have a “tag” that stores which variant is the correct one at runtime; unions don't have this tag.

Since we can interpret the data held in the union using the wrong variant and Rust can’t check this for us, that means reading a union’s field is unsafe:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
# union MyUnion {
#     f1: u32,
#     f2: f32,
# }
let mut u = MyUnion { f1: 1 };

u.f1 = 5;

let value = unsafe { u.f1 };
#}

Pattern matching works too:

# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
# union MyUnion {
#     f1: u32,
#     f2: f32,
# }
fn f(u: MyUnion) {
    unsafe {
        match u {
            MyUnion { f1: 10 } => { println!("ten"); }
            MyUnion { f2 } => { println!("{}", f2); }
        }
    }
}
#}

When are unions useful? One major use-case is interoperability with C. C APIs can (and depending on the area, often do) expose unions, and so this makes writing API wrappers for those libraries significantly easier. Additionally, unions also simplify Rust implementations of space-efficient or cache-efficient structures relying on value representation, such as machine-word-sized unions using the least-significant bits of aligned pointers to distinguish cases.

There’s still more improvements to come. For now, unions can only include Copy types and may not implement Drop. We expect to lift these restrictions in the future.