...The main idea behind traits is to group types outside the type-hierarchy and to make dispatch work with that grouping. The difference to Union-types is that types can be added to a trait after the creation of the trait, whereas Union types are fixed after creation. The cool thing about Tim's trick is that there is no performance impact compared to using ordinary dispatch. For a bit of background and a quick introduction to traits watch my 10min JuliaCon 2015 talk.