Q: How to work with heterogeneous data

[crlf0710]

Sometimes enums might suffice

Accessing shared fields from different variants

Providing shared behavior - with delegation

Accessing field and behavior provided by a single variant and a subset of variants

Using boxed trait objects

to save wasted bytes

to store downstream defined variants

dyn*, the even more convenient future

Working with external explicit definitions from ffi

Prefix struct defintions: a group of types that has the same prefix sequence of fields starting at offset 0

Working with "packed" external explicit definitions from ffi

A series of "records" stored continuously within a data buffer.

Validity checking on the fly when the total blob size is huge