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Union

A union defines a tagged union of one or more inline struct or message definitions. Each is preceded by a “discriminator” or “tag” value. This defines a type whose values may assume any one of the aggregate layouts defined inside. It corresponds to something like C++‘s std::variant or Rust enum.

union U {
    1 -> message A { }
    2 -> struct B {  }
}

The binary representation of a U value is then: a length prefix, followed by either (a) a 01 byte followed by an encoding of an A message, or (b) a 02 byte followed by an encoding of a B struct.

Just like with messages, new branches may be added to a union later. When an unrecognized discriminator value is encountered, the length prefix is used to skip over the body, and decoding fails in a way your program may catch.

Nested types are not available globally but do reserve the identifier globally. E.g. in the above you cannot define struct Other { A x; } because A is private to U but you also cannot define struct A { } because A is reserved globally.