But of course the real solution is to use a strong and composable type for your comparison result, rather than remove the entire thing because you originally designed the API wrong.
For two values `x` and `y` of the same type with fields `a` and `b`, this lets you compare on `a` first and then on `b` by writing
``` x.a.cmp(&y.a).then(x.b.cmp(&y.b)) ```
(x.a, x.b) < (y.a, y.b)
Using -1, 0 and 1 to represent these feels like something that was a clever trick for low level code on a PDP-11 and hasn't been a good idea since the 1970s.