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Facets provide a general-purpose mechanism for non-intrusively extending the type system of an application, by loosely coupling new type instances to existing ones. This shifts the type selection process from compile to run time and implements a form of late binding. This is particularly useful for versioning an application.

Due to their loose coupling among each other, facets are better suited to solve the versioning problem than other approaches. However, facets are not a panacea that would solve the versioning problem for free, and careful design is still necessary to come up with versioned systems that remain understandable and maintain consistent semantics.

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