I’m not happy with that restriction in the proposal:

Existentials cannot be used with generics in the following ways:

In generic declarations, with the requirements composed out of generic type 
variables:

// NOT ALLOWED
func foo<A, B>(x: A, y: B) -> Any<A, B> { ... }

Why is that not allowed?

I would have hoped to be able to write something like

func union<A, B>(x: Set<A>, y: Set<B>) -> Set<Any<A, B>> { … }


-Thorsten



> Am 26.05.2016 um 07:53 schrieb Austin Zheng via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org>:
> 
> The inimitable Joe Groff provided me with an outline as to how the design 
> could be improved. I've taken the liberty of rewriting parts of the proposal 
> to account for his advice.
> 
> It turns out the runtime type system is considerably more powerful than I 
> expected. The previous concept in which protocols with associated types' APIs 
> were vended out selectively and using existentials has been discarded.
> 
> Instead, all the associated types that belong to an existential are 
> accessible as 'anonymous' types within the scope of the existential. These 
> anonymous types are not existentials - they are an anonymous representation 
> of whatever concrete type is satisfying the existential's value's underlying 
> type's associated type.
> 
> This is an enormous step up in power - for example, an existential can return 
> a value of one of these anonymous associated types from one function and pass 
> it into another function that takes the same type, maintaining perfect type 
> safety but without ever revealing the actual type. There is no need anymore 
> to limit the APIs exposed to the user, although there may still exist APIs 
> that are semantically useless without additional type information.
> 
> A set of conversions has also been defined. At compile-time 'as' can be used 
> to turn values of these anonymous associated types back into existentials 
> based on the constraints defined earlier. 'as?' can also be used for 
> conditional casting of these anonymously-typed values into potential actual 
> types.
> 
> As always, the link is here, and feedback would be greatly appreciated: 
> https://github.com/austinzheng/swift-evolution/blob/az-existentials/proposals/XXXX-enhanced-existentials.md
>  
> <https://github.com/austinzheng/swift-evolution/blob/az-existentials/proposals/XXXX-enhanced-existentials.md>
> 
> Best,
> Austin
> 
> On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 5:09 AM, Matthew Johnson via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> On May 23, 2016, at 9:52 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
> 
> >> One initial bit of feedback -  I believe if you have existential types, I 
> >> believe you can define Sequence Element directly, rather than with a type 
> >> alias. e.g.
> >>
> >> protocol Sequence {
> >>  associatedtype Element
> >>  associatedtype Iterator: any<IteratorProtocol where 
> >> IteratorProtocol.Element==Element>
> >>  associatedtype SubSequence: any<Sequence where Sequence.Element == 
> >> Element>
> >>  …
> >> }
> >
> > That's not really the same thing. Any<IteratorProtocol> is an existential, 
> > not a protocol. It's basically an automatically-generated version of our 
> > current `AnyIterator<T>` type (though with some additional flexibility). It 
> > can't appear on the right side of a `:`, any more than AnyIterator could.
> 
> After this proposal you should be able to use these existentials anywhere you 
> can place a constraint, so it would work.  You can do this with the protocol 
> composition operator today and the future existential is just an extension of 
> that capability.
> 
> >
> > What *would* work is allowing `where` clauses on associated types:
> >
> >> protocol Sequence {
> >>  associatedtype Element
> >>  associatedtype Iterator: IteratorProtocol where Iterator.Element==Element
> >>  associatedtype SubSequence: Sequence where SubSequence.Element == Element
> >>  …
> >> }
> >
> > I believe this is part of the generics manifesto.
> >
> > --
> > Brent Royal-Gordon
> > Architechies
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>
> > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution 
> > <https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution>
> 
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