I was thinking a little bit about the potentially hairy situation of
trying to deserialize a struct that has optional fields with default
values. The problem that could happen is that the optional field is
omitted from the serialized data, but once you're done reading, you
find your struct has a value for that field. I guess some people
might appreciate this situation, but personally, I think it would
lead to weird inconsistencies.
However, if we made the compiler throw errors when you try to assign
a default value to an optional field, then this problem could never
happen. Required fields would have to be present from the get go or
you'd get serialization errors, so there's no risk of running into
this problem.
What does everyone think about this option?
-Bryan
