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.

that's kind of a thing with https://docs.rs/no-panic/latest/no_panic/ or no std and custom panic handlers.

not sure what the latest is in the space, if I recall there are some subtleties

That's a neat hack, but it would be a lot nicer to have explicit support as part of the language.

That's going to be difficult because the language itself requires panic support to properly implement indexing, slicing, and integer division. There are checked methods that can be used instead, but to truly eliminate panics, the ordinary operators would have to be banned when used with non-const arguments, and this restriction would have to propagate to all dependencies as well.