Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions, functions returning bool, functions returning 0 on success, functions returning 0 on error, functions returning -1 on error, functions returning negative errno on error, functions taking optional pointer to bool to indicate error (optionally), functions taking reference to std::error_code to set an error (and having an overload with the same name that throws an exception on error if you forget to pass the std::error_code)...I understand there's 30 years of history, but it still is annoying, that even the standard library is not consistent (or striving for consistency).

Then you top it on with `?` shortcut and the functional interface of Result and suddenly error handling becomes fun and easy to deal with, rather than just "return false" with a "TODO: figure out error handling".

> The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions

This isn't really true since Rust has panics. It would be nice to have out-of-the-box support for a "no panics" subset of Rust, which would also make it easier to properly support linear (no auto-drop) types.

I wish more people (and crate authors) would treat panic!() as it really should be treated: only for absolutely unrecoverable errors that indicate that some sort of state is corrupted and that continuing wouldn't be safe from a data- or program-integrity perspective.

Even then, though, I do see a need to catch panics in some situations: if I'm writing some sort of API or web service, and there's some inconsistency in a particular request (even if it's because of a bug I've written), I probably really would prefer only that request to abort, not for the entire process to be torn down, terminating any other in-flight requests that might be just fine.

But otherwise, you really should just not be catching panics at all.